Footnote #58 - Wonder

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!

In this latest Fantasy/Animation Footnote, Chris and Alex wonder about wonder - a term that emphatically traverses both fantasy and animation as fields of study, yet with alternate meanings and connotations related to everything from mid-1990s cultures of special effects appreciation to fantasy’s historical links to the so-called “wonder film.” Topics include the “wonder years” of special effects production and reception during the 1990s via what Michele Pierson calls a growing “connoisseurship” of effects technologies; histories of the effects-laden ‘wonder film’ as an industrial category and links to the ‘wonder tale’; wonder itself as both the aestheticization of thought and/or thought induced by aesthetics; wonder’s role in fantasy scholarship to describe distinctions between fantasy, horror, and science-fiction; and more recent turns towards expanded animation and the spectatorship and ‘siting’ of wonder in the digital age.

**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**

**As featured on Feedspot’s 25 Best London Education Podcasts**

Suggested Readings

• Carells, Edwin. 2013. “Spaces of Wonder: Animation and Museology.” In Pervasive Animation, ed. Suzanne Buchan, 292-316. London & New York: Routledge.

• Clute, John, and John Grant, eds. 1999. The Encyclopedia of Fantasy. New York: St. Martin’s Griffin.

• Fisher, Philip. 1998. Wonder, the Rainbow, and the Aesthetics of Rare Experiences. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

• Manlove, C.N. 1975. Modern Fantasy: Five Studies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

• Pierson, Michele. 2002. Special Effects: Still in Search of Wonder. New York: Columbia University Press.