Audiences around the world have long enjoyed the animated sitcom genre. However, the genre is rife with inaccurate neurodiverse representation. This extends as far back as The Simpsons (Matt Groening, 1989-), and as recent as Family Guy (Seth MacFarlane, 1999-).
Read MoreFor a long time, the work of Pixar Animation Studios was routinely presented as something of a gold standard for animation. A critical darling and box office juggernaut, Pixar’s run of early films from Toy Story (John Lasseter, 1995) to Toy Story 4 (Josh Cooley, 2019) were mostly unquestioned hits delivering nuanced meditations on everything from emotion to connection to self-actualisation.
Read MoreFranz Kafka once wrote that Gregor Samsa awoke one morning to find himself in the body of an enormous insect. This Metamorphosis caused Gregor some difficulties, and both Kafka’s novella as well as the stage adaptation by Steven Berkoff explored issues of class and identity.
Read MoreThe world that children occupy is full of secrets, and is a world not shared with adults. It is one concerned primarily with fantasy and imagination. Every child has a right to occupy that secret world; it’s part of childhood development and is an important locator of child identity as a ‘non-adult’. As Chris Jenks tells us, “the child is familiar to us and yet strange, he or she inhabits our world and yet seems to answer to another” (2020, 3). The child exists in its own distinct world and separation and agency are at the core of that world.
Read MoreMaria Sachiko Cecire’s Re-Enchanted: The Rise of Children’s Fantasy Literature in the Twentieth Century (2019) is an expertly crafted study. This is a book about children’s literature in the twentieth-century, how it came to be shaped, and why medieval elements are so prevalent.
Read MoreThe idea of the film star is bound up in the idea of ‘pure entertainment’ in two ways: a sense of an ideal world in which dilemmas and conflicts are harmoniously resolved, and in terms of the ways in which film stars offer audiences an idealised and intensified set of behaviours. With that in mind, one of the ways the 1995 fantasy film Jumanji (Joe Johnston, 1995) holds our interest is how it is the ‘authored’ work of a film star: in this case, Robin Williams.
Read MorePixar’s Toy Story (1995-2019) series explores a landscape full of plastic. Most of the main characters are plastic. Sheriff Woody isn’t made out of wood at all; his head, hands, and boots are all plastic. Mr. and Mrs. Potato Head, and their many anatomical add-ons, are plastic. T-Rex is plastic. The little soldiers are plastic, as are their parachutes. Mr. Spell’s outer shell is plastic. And Buzz Lightyear, when he first arrives in Toy Story (John Lasseter, 1995), is the shiniest, newest, most gorgeous piece of plastic anyone has ever seen.
Read MoreThe most recent Pixar film, Onward (Dan Scanlon, 2020), tells the story of two brothers, Ian and Barley, who set out on a magical quest in a bid to spend one final day with their late father. On Ian’s sixteenth birthday he is presented with a gift left to him by his father, whom he has never met, with the instructions that he and his older brother could only open it when they were both at least sixteen. Onward is therefore a story strongly embedded in loss. Ian is a teenager, unsure of himself and anxious about transitioning into adulthood.
Read MoreLife is Strange 2 (2018-) is a deeply emotive episodic videogame that revolves around a teenager and his young brother who are thrown into a series of adventures steeped with numerous struggles rooted in modern social and cultural realism. Towards the beginning of the game, the boy’s father dies at the hands of a police officer (who also is killed), and the siblings must go on the run out of fear they may be wrongly accused, arrested and separated.
Read MoreUnless you enjoy paying to watch one very long and annoying advert for a toyline you no longer play with, I suspect Playmobil: The Movie (Lino DiSalvo, 2019) isn’t for you. Based on an original story by Lino DiSalvo, Playmobil: The Movie (Fig. 1) tells the story of Marla (Anya Taylor-Joy) and Charlie Brenner (Gabriel Bateman), two siblings who are sucked into a Playmobil world filled with tacky plastic adventures and totally unmemorable side characters.
Read MoreAn academic conference on the key creative figures and animated feature films of renowned Japanese production house Studio Ghibli seems an obvious - even borderline ideal - candidate for working through the interplay between fantasy and animation. Our earlier podcast on their third cel-animated feature My Neighbor Totoro (Hayao Miyazaki, 1988) - whose primary spirit character Totoro now functions as the company’s logo image (Fig.1) - suggested just how much there was to say not only about the adventures of the eponymous creature, but the studio’s origins and evolution, production practices, and their relationship to anime as a creative medium, if not Ghibli’s longstanding critical repute and ongoing commercial acclaim.
Read MoreAnimated fantasy film Watership Down (Martin Rosen,1978) represents something of a critical cultural conundrum that underwrites its complex status as a children’s feature. On the one hand, this hand-drawn fable - that follows a cross-countryside journey made by a colony of rabbits - represents the best of British animation, with an impressive voice cast (featuring John Hurt, Richard Briers, Simon Cadell and Nigel Hawthorne) giving life to a beautifully evocative cel-animated style that fully demonstrates the pre-digital artistry of paint-and-ink animation production. On the other hand lies its well-established identity as an emotionally traumatic experience, one that trades in themes of political uprising, Fascism and grief, all the while being scored to graphic images of blood, gore, and death.
Read MoreFantasy and animation, especially when combined, are often associated within popular discourse with children’s media. Referring predominantly to stop-motion animation, this post offers some thoughts on what the intrinsic association between children, fantasy and animation might mean in the context of another genre that has a more problematic relationship with child audiences: horror. Although horror is rarely considered a children’s genre, horror films addressed to children do exist, and across various forms of animation and live-action: the stop-motion animated Frankenweenie (Tim Burton, 2012), CG-animated Monster House (Gil Kenan, 2006), or the live-action Hocus Pocus (Kenny Ortega, 1993).
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