Another trip through the Fantasy/Animation archive lands on this very early episode from February 2019 that focuses on Studio Ghibli’s My Neighbor Totoro (Hayao Miyazaki, 1988).
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2024 kicks off with this episode on The Dark Crystal (Jim Henson & Frank Oz, 1982), recorded at the British Library with Tanya Kirk, Lead Curator of Printed Heritage Collections 1601–1900, and one of the organisers and curators of the Fantasy: Realms of Imagination exhibition that runs at the library until February of this year.
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Chris and Alex continue their journey through the world of Harry Potter for Episode 128 of the podcast, looking at the fourth instalment Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (Mike Newell, 2005) accompanied by special guest Dr Taylor Driggers. Taylor is an academic researcher specialising in fantasy literature, theology and religious studies, gender, and sexuality, whose PhD in English Literature from the University of Glasgow focused on fantasy literature’s potential to offer queer and feminist re-visionings of Christian theology and religious practices.
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Whomping willows, Ford Anglias, and so much more are covered in episode 117 of the podcast, which (better late than never!) returns to Hogwarts for the second instalment of the Harry Potter film franchise and an adaptation of the 1998 novel originally released back in November 2002. Joining Chris and Alex for a closer look at Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (Chris Columbus, 2002) is Jyotsna Kapur, who is a Professor of Cinema and Media Studies at Southern Illinois University.
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For Episode 112, Chris and Alex are joined for this discussion of HBO’s television series House of the Dragon (Ryan Condal & George R. R. Martin, 2021-) - the prequel to Game of Thrones (David Benioff & D. B. Weiss, 2011-2019) - by Professor Kim Akass, who is Professor of Radio, Television and Film at Rowan University, Glassboro.
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The 2022 Fantasy/Animation Christmas special is here, with Chris and Alex well and truly ‘walking in the air’ (!) for Episode 110 of the podcast as they wonder at the delights of The Snowman (Dianne Jackson, 1982), the 26-minute television special released on Channel 4 in the early 1980s and based on Raymond Briggs’ picture book.
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Episode 108 returns Chris and Alex once more to the world of Japanese anime as they look at the images of displacement, gluttony, and labour in Spirited Away (Hayao Miyazaki, 2001), perhaps the flagship Studio Ghibli animated feature and a film that won the 2003 Academy Award for Best Animated Feature.
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Episode 106 marks Chris and Alex’s first foray into the filmmaking career of Steven Spielberg as they take on the director’s 1982 science-fiction fantasy E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. To help explore the film’s status as a landmark of popular U.S. cinema is special guest Dr Noel Brown, who is Senior Lecturer in Film and Programme Leader for Film and Visual Culture at Liverpool Hope University.
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Episode 99 is a special instalment of the podcast recorded live at the British Film Institute in London back in May 2022, with Chris and Alex joined by an audience of anime fans to discuss Your Name (Makoto Shinkai, 2016) as part of the BFI’s Anime season.
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Based on Elizabeth Goudge’s 1992 children’s story Little White Horse, the 2008 fantasy The Secret of Moonacre (Gábor Csupó, 2008) is the subject of Episode 96 of the podcast, with Chris and Alex joined in their discussion of morality, class, and the power of the ego by the film’s screenwriter and Associate Producer Lucy Shuttleworth, who is also Senior Lecturer in the School of Film, Media and Communication at the University of Portsmouth.
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Myth, magic, and technology take to the skies in Episode 93 of the podcast, with Howl’s Moving Castle (Hayao Miyazaki, 2004) providing a welcome return to the steampunk spectacle and metamorphic marvels of Japanese anime. Joining Chris and Alex to examine Studio Ghibli’s 2004 feature film fantasy of flight is Professor Brian Attebery, writer and professor of English at Idaho State University, who took over as editor of the Journal of the Fantastic in Arts in 2006, and is also a prolific author whose seminal work encompasses all things fantasy literary, history, and storytelling.
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Tuck in for some Valentine’s Day spaghetti and meatballs as Chris and Alex chew on Walt Disney’s celebrated cel-animated love story Lady and the Tramp (Clyde Geronimi, Wilfred Jackson & Hamilton Luske, 1955), a musical romance released in the mid-1950s and based on the 1945 Cosmopolitan magazine story “Happy Dan, The Cynical Dog” by Ward Greene. The studio’s first CinemaScope release and a film that coincided with the opening of Disneyland in California, Lady and Tramp is rife with context and offers a number of threads that speak to the landscape of Disney animation in the 1950s.
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The spectacular animated world of U.S. filmmaker Don Bluth is the focus of Episode 82, with Chris and Alex journeying to the Great Valley for this discussion of The Land Before Time (Don Bluth, 1988). Joining them is Dr Mark Witton, vertebrate palaeontologist and palaeoartist (based at the University of Portsmouth), who is best known for his scientific research and illustrations around the habits and behaviors of pterosaurs, as well as his consultancy work with museums and on the BBC television series Walking with Dinosaurs (1999) and Planet Dinosaur (2011).
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Episode 81 of the podcast provides an introductory survey of Sub-Saharan African animation, as Chris and Alex plot a pathway through a cross-section of animated fantasies covering a multitude of forms, styles and modes from a number of African countries and territories. Joining them is Dr Paula Callus, Associate Professor in Computer Animation at Bournemouth University and an expert in Sub-Saharan African animation, who has also worked as a consultant and educator on the UNESCO Africa Animated projects in Kenya and South Africa, and who has been involved in projects looking at marginalization and the use of digital technologies (with a focus upon Arts, Activism and Marginalization in Nairobi).
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Chris and Alex return once more to the pioneering work of stop-motion animator and effects artist Ray Harryhausen, this time looking at his 1973 fantasy film collaboration with director Gordon Hessler, The Golden Voyage of Sinbad. For Episode 80, the focus is on the quasi-parasitic relationship between live-action and animation filmmaking, and the spectatorial fantasy engendered and invited by each form of moving image technology.
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Are we dreaming, or are we awake? How do we choose which realities to believe in? What levels of fictionality count? Find out in Episode 65, which works its way through the dream logic and desires of Inception (Christopher Nolan, 2010), a film that probes deep into our unconscious to revel in how dreams allow us to participate in a shared fantasy. Joining Chris and Alex as they kick back through the layers of Inception’s rhizomatic, mazelike structure is Todd McGowan, Professor of Film Studies in the Film and Television Studies Department at the University of Vermont, and author of a number of books on psychoanalytic film theory, film comedy and popular media, including The Real Gaze: Film Theory after Lacan (2007) and The Fictional Christopher Nolan (2012).
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The anarchy and artistry of British television animation provides the springboard for Episode 58 of the Fantasy/Animation podcast, which welcomes London-based media artist, animator and curator Professor Birgitta Hosea (who is also the Director of the Animation Research Centre at the University for the Creative Arts) to talk about Roobarb (Grange Calveley, 1974) directed by English animator Bob Godfrey.
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Chris and Alex dust off their knowledge of early film history for Episode 55 as they examine Martin Scorsese’s adventure Hugo (2011), a playful mystery set in 1930s Paris that takes audiences through the special effects and spectacular stagecraft of pioneering filmmaker Georges Méliès. Joining Chris and Alex amid the architecture of the Gare Montparnasse is Eric Smoodin, Professor of American Studies and Cinema and Technocultural Studies at the University of California, who has published monographs and edited collections on Walt Disney, Frank Capra and Hollywood film history, as well as a new book Paris in the Dark: Going to the Movies in the City of Light, 1930–1950 (Duke University Press, 2020) that sketches a picture of French film culture of the 1930s and 1940s.
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Episode 51 travels back to the late-1980s to look closely at Beetlejuice (Tim Burton, 1988), a film that uses stop-motion, practical effects, prosthetics, make-up and bluescreen to complete its fantasy story of netherworlds, outsiderdom and life after death. Joining Chris and Alex is special guest Jingan Young, playwright, screenwriter, journalist and academic who is the editor of ‘Foreign Goods’ (the first collection of British Chinese plays published in the UK) and a regular contributor to The Guardian and Hong Kong Free Press, who has recently completed a PhD in Film Studies at King’s College London.
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Recorded live at the Portsmouth Bookfest on Tuesday 25th February 2020, this bonus episode of the podcast has Alex flying solo as he interviews artist and illustrator Graham Humphreys, best known for designing the iconic film posters for horror features The Evil Dead (Sam Raimi, 1981) and A Nightmare on Elm Street (Wes Craven, 1984).
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