Footnote #38 tackles the recurrent motif of the storybook that so often begins Disney’s animated features, but which also takes other forms and styles as part of the studio’s sustained dramatisation of storytelling.
Read MoreChris and Alex return to the Footnote format for this latest episode on “twice told tales” - a term that, following its Shakespearean origins, has been applied by writers of fantasy to refer to fantasy’s relationship to oral literature and fairytales. Topics include the fairytale’s codification of oral culture; legacies of literary structures and the power of (re)telling the beats of a story; shifting narrative templates and the act of adding one story ‘on top’ of another; and the spectatorial pleasure of receiving the fantasy of twice told creativity.
Read MoreThe tension between spectacle and narrative is investigated through the seminal work of Tom Gunning and his formulation of the “cinema of attractions” in this latest Footnote episode, in which Chris and Alex hold cinema’s propensity for exhibitionist visual display and its later development of story in delicate balance.
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