FAMILY — current posts — Fantasy/Animation

Review: Memoir of a Snail (Adam Elliot, 2024) - Fantasies in the Trash Heap

Memoir of a Snail (Adam Elliot, 2024), the stop-motion story of Grace (or Gracie) a young mollusc-obsessed girl growing up in 1970s Australia, is not a fantasy film. Unless, of course, it is entirely a fantasy. As Grace thinks back over her life, and how she found herself in the ‘present day,’ she offers her pet snail Sylvia (and by extension the audience) a tale as bizarre, incongruous, and carefully curated as the vast array of snail-related memorabilia she has collected over the years.

FILM REVIEWMarkus BeekenJune 21, 2024SHORTS, CRAFT, CHILDHOOD, STOP-MOTION, FAMILY Comment

Marvellous Strange: Petite Maman (Sciamma, 2021) and the Fantastic - Part II

In the first part of this blog post, I looked at how Petite Maman evokes the fantastic in its movement between what Tzvetan Todorov calls the uncanny and the marvellous, through the tale of a young girl (Nelly) meeting her own mother (Marion) at the same age. In this second part, I will look in further detail at the magical uncertainty, ambiguity and a wavering between different cinematic modes that Sciamma’s film presents.

EDITORIALBen TyrerJanuary 21, 2022FANTASY, UNCANNY, MARVELLOUS, FAMILY, TZVETAN TODOROVComment

Review: Encanto (Jared Bush & Byron Howard, 2021)

Being Colombian is an act of faith. This is how Jorge Luis Borges aptly puts it in his short story ‘Ulrikke,’ published in a 1975 collection. And although I have felt that my identity as a Colombian has always been somewhat unstable or in doubt for a variety of reasons (like growing up in an increasingly globalized world), it was never as affirmed as it was when I went to the cinema to see Disney’s recent computer-animated feature Encanto (Byron Howard & Jared Bush, 2021) in the UK.

FILM REVIEWJuliana VarelaDecember 17, 2021MAGIC, DISNEY, COMPUTER-ANIMATED FILM, FAMILY, NATION, CULTUREComment

Marvellous Strange: Petite Maman (Sciamma, 2021) and the Fantastic - Part I

To describe Céline Sciamma’s new film, Petite Maman (2021) (Fig. 1) as “Alain Resnais does Bridge to Terabithia” would surely be to do a disservice to all involved, and the director’s own references are – more appropriately – Alice Guy-Blaché, Germaine Dulac and Miyazaki Hayao (especially My Neighbor Totoro [1988] and Spirited Away [2002]).

EDITORIALBen TyrerDecember 10, 2021FANTASTIC, FAMILY, UNCANNY, MARVELLOUS, TZVETAN TODOROVComment

The Nature of SpongeBob’s Gayness

Last summer, SpongeBob came out—in a way. On June 13, 2020, Nickelodeon, the longtime home of SpongeBob SquarePants (Stephen Hillenburg, 1999-), wrote that it was “Celebrating #Pride with the LGBTQ+ community and their allies,” setting a rainbow-tied SpongeBob alongside trans actor Michael D. Cohen (of Henry Danger [Nathan Kress, 2014-2020] fame) and the bisexual animated character Korra (first seen on Avatar: The Last Airbender [Michael Dante DiMartino and Bryan Konietzko 2012-2014]) in a much-favourited tweet.

EDITORIALKyle MeikleFebruary 26, 2021QUEER IDENTITY, REPRESENTATION, TELEVISION, AMERICA, FAMILY, ADULTComment

The fantasy of the Japanese family in Hosoda Mamoru’s Mirai (2018)

In a world of globalised animation, anime’s influence is ever expanding, ranging from adult Netflix animations like Castlevania (Warren Ellis, 2017-) to a wide variety of western children’s TV shows from Teen Titans (Glen Murakami and Sam Register, 2003-2006) to She-Ra and the Princesses of Power (Noelle Stevenson, 2018-2020).

EDITORIALIssy MacleodJuly 24, 2020JAPAN, MODERNITY, FAMILY, STYLE Comments

A Fantasy/Animation Star? - Robin Williams

In the introduction to Fantasy/Animation: Connections Between Media, Mediums and Genres, Christopher Holliday and Alex Sergeant argue that “the fantasy and animation relationship should be conceptualized not as an “and” or an “or”, but as a dialect of “fantasy/animation”” (2018: 13). The slash that appears in the book’s (and this blog’s) title is not a ‘fixed divide’, but a “fluid channel through which fantasy and animation are permitted to intersect, collide and intermingle” (ibid.)

EDITORIALJulie Lobalzo WrightNovember 1, 2019STARDOM, HOLLYWOOD, FAMILY, PERFORMANCE Comment