Footnote #59 - Magic
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!
Fantasy/Animation turns to a kind of magic for this latest Footnote episode, and the role of the magical in the distinction that lies within fantasy between the knowingness of illusion and the pursuit of rationality. Expect turns to how magic can embody both an appreciation of a non-scientific worldview and a magic show’s illusion and sleight-of-hand; theological superstition, spirituality and religion, and what this means for understanding belief in magic as a form of ‘social action’; magic as vital to thinking through the strangeness of fantasy and its language of the fantastic; and how magic invokes a pleasure of engagement rooted in choosing feeling over rationality.
**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**
**As featured on Feedspot’s 25 Best London Education Podcasts**
Suggested Readings
Fowkes, Katherine A. 2010. The Fantasy Film. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.
O’Keefe, Daniel Lawrence. 1983. Stolen Lightning: The Social Theory of Magic. New York: Continuum.
Styers, Randall. 2004. Making Magic: Religion, Magic, and Sciencein the Modern World. New York: Oxford University Press.
Worley, Alec. 2005. Empires of the Imagination: A Critical Survey of Fantasy Cinema from Georges Méliès to The Lord of the Rings. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers.