“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 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.
Read MoreEpisode 79 marks a special edition of the podcast, recorded back in February 2021 as part of the virtual Fantasy/Animation @ Canterbury Anifest event where Chris and Alex curated a series of podcasts, themed blog posts, a roundtable on the topic of diversity and inclusion (returning to the Anti-Racist Syllabus) and a live Q&A, as well as premiering a brand new Fantasy/Animation podcast episode released exclusively for festival attendees.
Read MoreThe 2002 Disney science-fiction epic Treasure Planet (Ron Clements & John Musker, 2002) is the focus of Episode 78 of the podcast, which looks at the melding together of the Disney formula with space fantasy in this swashbuckling adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson’s 1883 adventure novel Treasure Island. Joining Chris and Alex for this bumper episode are two very special guests: Ron Clements and John Musker, who aside from writing and directorial duties on Treasure Planet are known as a filmmaking duo absolutely central to the renaissance of Disney animation in the 1980s and 1990s.
Read MoreThe first instalment of The Hunger Games (2012) franchise, directed by Gary Ross, provides the focus of Episode 77 of the podcast, which looks at the film’s connections to ethics, rationality and affect, and what structures our emotional engagement with its narrative of totalitarian systems and panoptic visions. Joining Chris and Alex to examine the immersive world of Panem is Dr Tarja Laine, Assistant Professor in Film Studies at the University of Amsterdam and author of the new monograph Emotional Ethics of The Hunger Games (2021), as well as the books Bodies in Pain: Emotion and the Cinema of Darren Aronofsky (2015), Feeling Cinema: Emotional Dynamics in Film Studies (2011) and Shame and Desire: Emotion, Intersubjectivity, Cinema (2007).
Read MoreThe politics and proxies of James Cameron’s 2009 blockbuster Avatar provide the focus for Chris and Alex in Episode 76, as they plug into Pandora to make sense of the relationships between the film’s ecological sensibilities and its technological prowess. Joining them is Rupert Read, Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of East Anglia who specialises in everything from the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein to the contemporary climate crisis. Rupert was also a spokesperson for Extinction Rebellion (authoring the 2020 book Extinction Rebellion: Insights from the Inside), and was a Green Party councillor from 2004-2011 (having stood for both national parliamentary and European elections).
Read MoreFor Episode 75, Chris and Alex revisit the work of Aardman Animations, taking a look at their debut feature film Chicken Run (Peter Lord & Nick Park, 2000), whose narrative of meat pies and morality remains underwritten by the Bristol-based studio’s signature stop-motion style and very British sense of anarchy. Joining them for this discussion of the art of poultry-in-motion is Chicken Run’s very own Mac, the loveable Scottish genius engineer chicken voiced by writer, actress, and story coach and consultant Lynn Ferguson.
Read MoreIn this latest episode, Chris and Alex sit down with the Disney+ series WandaVision (Jac Schaeffer, 2021), a spectacular fantasy of U.S. television history that continues the citational practices and narrative complexities of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, yet does so by working through the industrial, cultural and stylistic lexicon of the sitcom.
Read MoreEpisode 73 reaches deep into the science, spaces and squids of Arrival (Denis Villeneuve, 2016), the recent science-fiction feature starring Amy Adams and Jeremy Renner, and based on Ted Chiang’s 1998 short story “Story of Your Life.” Joining Chris and Alex to discuss this atmospheric subversion of the sci-fi genre is Dr William Brown, Independent Scholar and Honorary Fellow at the University of Roehampton whose research expertise focuses on contemporary digital and new media, posthumanism, critical race theory, and film-philosophy.
Read MoreChris and Alex continue their discussions of Studio Ghibli for Episode 72 with a look at animated war feature Grave of the Fireflies (Isao Takahata, 1988), a film that was initially released as a double bill with partner My Neighbor Totoro (Hayao Miyazaki, 1988). Telling the story of teenage boy Seita and his younger sister Setsuko who, after fleeing the city of Kobe, must navigate the public horrors and personal traumas of World War II, Grave of the Fireflies offers a graphic and emotional portrait of conflict and society through the isolation and struggle experienced by the siblings. Joining the podcast this week to discuss the film’s potent political message is Alex Dudok de Wit, Associate Editor at Cartoon Brew, freelance journalist (including work for the BFI/Sight and Sound) and author of the upcoming BFI Film Classic on Grave of the Fireflies (London: Bloomsbury, 2021).
Read MoreTwisting and travelling back and forth (and then back again) is Episode 71 of the podcast, which has Chris and Alex visit the fictional German town of Winden for Dark (Baran bo Odar & Jantje Friese, 2017-2020), Netflix’s hugely successful science-fiction series that tells the story of supernatural activity and conspiracy set against the backdrop of interconnected family trees and time-space conundrums. Joining them is the programme’s VFX Production Supervisor Nicolas Leu, whose film and television work beyond Dark as part of the RISE Visual Effects Studio also includes Game of Thrones (David Benioff & D.B. Weiss, 2011-2019), Marvel features Captain America: The Winter Soldier (Anthony Russo & Joe Russo, 2014) and Doctor Strange (Scott Derrickson, 2016), Creed (Ryan Coogler, 2015), The Fate of the Furious (F. Gary Gray, 2017), American Renegades (Steven Quale, 2017), and Dumbo (Tom Burton, 2019).
Read MoreChris and Alex take to the basketball court for a sports-themed instalment of the podcast by looking at Space Jam (Joe Pytka, 1996), the part-animated, part-Michael Jordan sports comedy that has lots to say about the spectacle of stylistic hybridity, animation’s longstanding relationship to sport, and nostalgia via its many callbacks to Golden Age Hollywood cartooning all through the lens of NBA basketball. Joining them for Episode 70 is Professor Paul Wells, who is Director of the Animation Academy at Loughborough University, as well as being an internationally established scholar, screenwriter and director, working across and within both academia and industry contexts.
Read MoreFollowing our take on Star Wars: The Force Awakens (J.J. Abrams, 2015), the next instalment in the new Star Wars trilogy gets the Fantasy/Animation treatment for Episode 69, as Chris and Alex (and the Force) battle through Star Wars: The Last Jedi (Rian Johnson, 2017) to talk about its gender politics, questions of fandom and the film’s narrative of resistance, rebellion and struggle for power. Joining them for this celebration of contemporary Hollywood science-fiction is film critic and journalist Helen O’Hara, editor-at-large of Empire film magazine, and author of the book The Ultimate Superhero Movie Guide (2020) and the recent Women vs. Hollywood: The Fall And Rise Of Women In Film (2021).
Read MoreEpisode 68 marks Chris and Alex’s first look at popular animation studio DreamWorks, turning to the California-based company’s early cycle of cel-animated cartoons to examine The Prince of Egypt (Brenda Chapman, Steve Hickner & Simon Wells, 1998). Joining them to separate the historical realism from the packaged Westernised fantasy is biblical scholar and broadcaster Francesca Stavrakopoulou, Professor of Hebrew Bible and Ancient Religion at the University of Exeter, whose research encompasses ancient Israelite and Judahite religions, and portrayals of the religious past in the Hebrew Bible.
Read MoreChris and Alex return to the feature films of the Bristol-based Aardman Animations studio for Episode 67, travelling from the world of Kensington propriety ‘up top’ to the underground chaos of Ratropolis ‘down below’ for Flushed Away (David Bowers & Sam Fell, 2006), which tells the story of the trials and tribulations of high society rat Roddy St. James who is inadvertently flushed down into the sewers of London. Mirroring this narrative collision of worlds, Flushed Away also bears the industrial weight of such duality, being part of a 12-year, four-film $250million agreement between Aardman and Hollywood studio DreamWorks Animation to produce a series of animated features.
Read MoreEpisode 66 is a real toe-tapper, as Chris and Alex dance to the beat of George Miller’s 2006 computer-animated musical feature Happy Feet (George Miller, 2006), produced by U.S. studio Village Roadshow Pictures in collaboration with Australian animation and VFX studio Animal Logic. Joining them to discuss this digital tale of all-singing all-dancing penguins is Dr Hannah Hamad, Senior Lecturer in Media and Communication at Cardiff University’s School of Journalism, Media and Culture, having previously been Lecturer in Film Studies at King’s College London, and Senior Lecturer in Media Studies at the University of East Anglia.
Read MoreAre 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).
Read More2021 kicks off with a supersonic bang as Chris and Alex return to the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) to explore the world of Kree Empires, alien shapeshifters, flerkens, and digital de-aging in American superhero feature Captain Marvel (Anna Boden & Ryan Fleck, 2019), based on the celebrated Marvel Comics character. Joining them for a discussion of Hollywood special effects production and the labour of fantastical imagery are the film’s VFX Producer Christine Neumann and VFX Supervisor Dominik Zimmerle of German visual effects studio Trixter based in Munich, whose work also includes a number of Hollywood blockbusters and other MCU entries Spider-Man: Homecoming (Jon Watts, 2017), Thor: Ragnarok (Taika Waititi, 2017), Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 (James Gunn, 2017), Black Panther (Ryan Coogler, 2018) and the upcoming Black Widow (Cate Shortland, 2021).
Read MoreThe Christmas spirit is finally in the air, with Chris and Alex using Episode 63 of the podcast as their annual opportunity to discuss all things seasonal - this time examining the fantasy of Christmas advertising, and the repeated role played by animation in the construction of festive commercials, television ads and brand promotions. They are joined in their Yuletide deliberations by Dr Malcolm Cook, Associate Professor in Film Studies (University of Southampton), whose numerous publications include the monograph Early British Animation: From Page and Stage to Cinema Screens (2018) and the co-edited collection (with Professor Kirsten Moana Thompson) Animation and Advertising (2019).
Read MoreThe names Bond…James Bond in Episodes 61 and 62, as Chris and Alex tackle the official Eon James Bond 007 film series by casting their eyes over a longstanding staple of the franchise - the celebrated credits sequences. Beginning with Dr. No (Terence Young, 1962) and culminating in Spectre (Sam Mendes, 2015), listen as they place in rank order their ‘Top 24’ title sequences, judging their audiovisual spectacle, structural elements and broader connections to traditions in animated fantasy (Part 1 focuses on Bond films #24 to #13, while Part 2 counts down from #12 to their #1 ranked 007 title sequence). Joining them for this extended double-header is Dr Ed Lamberti, an independent researcher in Film Studies who has been a teaching assistant at King's College London, a screenwriting mentor at the London Film School, and who is currently Policy Manager at the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC).
Read MoreHeffalumps and Woozles take centre stage for Episode 60 of the podcast, as Chris and Alex take a trip deep into Hundred Acre Wood to confront Christopher Robin (Marc Forster, 2018) (not to be confused with the earlier A.A. Milne biography Goodbye Christopher Robin [Simon Curtis, 2017]…), and its pleasures of nostalgia.
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