Footnote #12 - The Lightning Sketch (with Malcolm Cook)
The Fantasy/Animation podcast takes listeners on a journey through the intersection between fantasy cinema and the medium of animation. Available via Apple Podcasts, Spotify and many of your favourite podcast hosting platforms!
Joining Chris and Alex for this lightning quick journey through the origins and aesthetics of the lightning sketch tradition in Footnote #12 of the podcast is Dr Malcolm Cook, Associate Professor in Film Studies (University of Southampton), author of Early British Animation: From Page and Stage to Cinema Screens (2018) and co-editor (with Professor Kirsten Moana Thompson) of the collection Animation and Advertising (2019). Malcolm was also a special guest on the earlier Christmas advertisements episode, but here he discusses the importance of ‘lightning cartooning’ to the history of animation; the spectatorial effects and perceptions involved in witnessing the live act of drawing; pioneers of the original stage show who became cinema’s very first animators such as J. Stuart Blackton, Georges Méliès, Walter Booth, Tom Merry, and Winsor McCay; the lightning sketch as a crucial point of contact between moving images and graphic art; and what the convergence between this music hall and vaudeville tradition with ‘trick film’ techniques has to say about about the emergence of the animated short.
**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**
Suggested Readings
Cook, Malcolm. 2018. Early British Animation: From Page and Stage to Cinema Screens. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Crafton, Donald. 1993. Before Mickey: The Animated Film 1898-1928. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.