Footnote #21 - World-Building
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!
The Fantasy/Animation Footnote podcasts return for 2023 with this 10-minute discussion of world-building, which examines both fantasy and animation’s ability to create believable and credible ‘worldly’ spaces. Chris and Alex wrestle with a number of ideas related to the appreciation of cinema beyond character and narrative, drawing on V.F. Perkins’ influential writing on film’s many fictional worlds to discuss the question of art’s connection to world-building, worldliness, and worldhood. Topics include cinema’s narration of almost imperceptible worldly details; the parameters of fictional horizons in relation to character (and spectator) knowledge; the interplay between onscreen and offscreen space; and the many bits of information that ‘go without saying’ to help convince and build our aesthetic encounters with the worlds of fiction.
**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**
Suggested Readings
Cavell, Stanley. 1979. The World Viewed. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
MacDowell, James. 2010. “What We Don't See, and What We Think it Means: Ellipsis and Occlusion in Rear Window.” Hitchcock Annual 16: 77-101.
Perkins, V. F. 2005. “Where is the world? The horizon of events in movie fiction.” In Style and Meaning: Studies in the Detailed Analysis of Film, eds. John Gibbs and Douglas Pye, 16-41. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Sergeant, Alexander. 2021. “Across the narrow screen: televisual world-building in Game of Thrones.” Screen 62, no. 2 (Summer): 193–213.
Walters, James. 2008, Alternative Worlds in Hollywood Cinema: Resonance Between Realms. London: Intellect.