“The show prides itself on being the podcasting world’s number one authority on all things sculptured, painted, drawn and designed within the world of popular entertainment. This podcast delivers on its promise in spades. Not only is it well produced, the sheer level of expertise on offer is unrivalled. ”
As featured on Feedspot’s Top 10 “Best Animation History Podcasts”!
Chris and Alex are delighted to welcome Dr. Jared Bahir Browsh (Assistant Teaching Professor, University of Colorado Boulder) to the podcast to discuss William Hanna and Joseph Barbera’s landmark animated sitcom The Flintstones (1960-1966), the first cartoon series to occupy a prime time slot on U.S. television.
Read MoreChris and Alex venture (back?) into the multiverse in this entirely unplanned episode on Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness (Sam Raimi, 2022), prompted by both a last-minute cinema trip and a desire to check-in once more with what’s happening in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
Read MoreEpisode 83 sees Chris and Alex trace the magical realist threads and overlapping timelines that build Anocha Suwichakornpong’s often confounding drama By the Time It Gets Dark (2016) (known in Thai as Dao Khanong), replete with its shifting realities, fleeting digital VFX and a pivotal citation of the ‘father of fantasy’ (as well as one of cinema’s first animators) Georges Méliès. Joining them to discuss Suwichakornpong’s mesmerising, kaleidoscopic, and highly original second feature film that dramatises the events of the 1976 Thammasat University massacre is Dr Felicity Gee, Senior Lecturer in Modernism and World Cinema at the University of Exeter, and author of the recent Magic Realism, World Cinema and the Avant-Garde (London: Routledge 2021).
Read MoreThe 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).
Read MorePerformer, composer, silent film accompanist and television presenter Neil Brand is the special guest joining Chris and Alex for Episode 57 of the podcast, which celebrates the musical beats and Mariachi owls of Rango (Gore Verbinski, 2011). Listen as they discuss how this curious 2011 computer-animated film revels in the power of telling tales alongside its broader relationship to folk ballads; Rango’s cinephilic evocation of canonical Hollywood Westerns and U.S. cinema history; themes of ambition, isolation, and aimlessness, and how this ties into a film whose existentialist narrative is predicated on the question of inevitability.
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