Fantasy/Animation

Chris and Alex delve into motion-capture, murder mystery, and monster houses for this discussion of Gil Kenan’s 2006 computer-animated film Monster House, a digital feature produced by the ImageMovers company founded by renowned filmmaker Robert Zemeckis and a specialist in animation utilising mo-cap technologies. Joining them for Episode 121 of the podcast is Dr Jane Batkin, an animation film theorist and Associate Professor in the School of Film, Media and Journalism at the University of Lincoln. Her book Identity in Animation: A Journey into Self, Difference, Culture and the Body was published in 2017, and she has had various chapters in edited collections on animation, including a recent piece on childhood wandering in Coraline: A Closer Look at Studio Laika’s Stop Motion Witchcraft (2021). Jane is currently working on a monograph on childhood in animated film and television and gained a British Academy Award for research in August 2022 for her project entitled “The Secret Space of Childhood in Animated and Live Action Cinema: Performance, Preservation and Metaphor.” Topics in this instalment include the production context for Monster House and the question of child labour; the uncanniness of children-in-performance and what it means for a child to be viewed as ‘acting’ vs. ‘being’; the digital rendering of surfaces and textures and the film’s ‘puppetlike’ character designs; computer animation and nostalgia, and whether it is possible to be nostalgic for CGI; the ‘body’ of animated homes and psycho-architectural spaces via the film’s proximity to the horror genre; and how Monster House’s negotiation of adulthood positions Kenan’s computer-animated feature as a ‘Sirkian’ melodrama for children.

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

The Fantasy/Animation Footnotes reach their half-century as Chris and Alex are once again joined by Dr Eve Benhamou, teaching fellow in Film Studies at the University Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3, France to examine the contradictory cultural and political space of postfeminism. A much-debated topic, postfeminism typically pivots on gendered discourses of agency, autonomy, potency, and physical empowerment. Topics include the ambivalent relationship between contemporary postfeminism and the ‘gains’ of earlier feminist movements; the culture and politics of postfeminism’s multimedia presence in the late-1990s and early-2000s; and how the graphic rendering of female bodies as both powerful and powerless feeds into the broader animated representation of postfeminist physicality.

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

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

Episode 139 marks something of a first as Chris and Alex play ‘The Fantasy Adventure Board Game’ Dungeons & Dragons originally created and designed by Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson in 1974, taking on its array of characters, weapons, and quests live during the podcast with special guest (and Dungeon Master) Dr Cat Mahoney, Derby Fellow in Communication and Media at the University of Liverpool. Cat is the co-editor with Jilly Boyce Kay and Caitlin Shaw of The Past in Visual Culture Essays on Memory, Nostalgia and the Media (McFarland, 2016) and author of the monograph Women in Neoliberal Postfeminist Television Drama: Representing Gendered Experiences of the Second World War (Palgrave, 2019), as well as multiple book chapters and articles engaging with representations of gender through historical and historiographical frameworks. Discussions during this roll-by-roll episode of the Dungeons & Dragons game include the suitability of fantasy as a genre conducive to the table-top role-playing game format; the influence of Gygax and Arneson’s fame upon the 1980s resurgence of fantasy cinema; Dungeons and Dragons as an enduring transmedia property and the possibilities of world-building; and how ‘metagaming’ in Dungeons and Dragons offers a way to think about the player’s complex relationship to character and embodiment.

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

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

The Fantasy/Animation podcast finally tackles the seminal Toy Story (John Lasseter, 1995), with Episode 138 looking at Pixar’s computer-animated feature and the film that transformed animation in Hollywood - and beyond - into a digital medium. Joining Chris and Alex to examine Toy Story’s computerised production and the pleasures of its pristine visual illusionism is Dr Lucy Fife Donaldson, Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at the University of St Andrews, whose work focuses on film and television style, audiovisual design and 'below-the-line' labour, performance and the body, and videographic criticism. Lucy is the author of Texture in Film (Palgrave MacMillan, 2014), and the co-editor (with James Walters) of Television Performance (Bloomsbury, 2019) and most recently, Epic / everyday: Moments in Television (Manchester University Press, 2023) with Sarah Cardwell & Jonathan Bignell. Topics in this episode include Toy Story’s digital surfaces and textures, and the vocabulary that is needed to talk about fine and peripheral detail; animation as a space of inescapable and intensified design; the contribution of everyday textures to the film’s construction of worldhood and the narrative journey of the toys; the plasticity of character and the miniaturisation (and magnification) of texture; and how Toy Story’s sense of ‘play’ is articulated via the careful and highly reflexive attention paid to scuffs, surfaces, and scale.

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

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

Episode 16 heralds the first Fantasy/Animation crossover instalment, with Chris and Alex joined by Michael Glass and José Arroyo, also known as the Eavesdropping at the Movies team. The focus of their discussions is Pixar’s feature film Coco (Lee Unkrich, 2017), a computer-animated fantasy inspired by the Mexican ‘Día de los Muertos’ (Day of the Dead) holiday. Seizing their moment, the foursome touch on issues of cultural specificity, authenticity and appropriation; its expressive use of luminescent lighting to illuminate its styles and details; and the themes of grief, ancestry, history and heritage that support the structures of a film whose two interconnected worlds of life and death are powered by the vitality of memory.