Fantasy/Animation Fantasy/Animation

Art’s relationship to the auratic is the focus of Footnote #47, which engages cinema’s historical relation to ‘aura’ via the foundational work of Walter Benjamin who argued for technology’s “withering” of art’s uniqueness of space and time thanks to the potential for the creation of a “plurality of copies” that shift art’s “unique existence.” Topics include photography’s reproducibility that creates ontological tensions between the ‘original’ and ‘copy'; processes of perception, proximity, and distance; and how for Benjamin, aura seemingly liquidated tradition in the age of invasive capitalism.
**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**

Footnote #46 responds to a listener email by focusing on the speeds and spaces of the “multiplanar” image, a term theorised in Thomas Lamarre’s writing on anime and its techniques which looks at how motion is able to divide animated landscapes into different planes of action. In this episode, Chris treats Alex to a rundown of Lamarre’s work on multiplanarity via the author’s citation of the optical logic of foreground and background spaces in relation to the window of a moving train; the particular geometric perspectives of anime against the graphic “hyper-three-dimensionality” of contemporary computer-animated film; the perspectives and “scalar relations” afforded by developments in the multi-plane camera; and how the defining animetism of anime “focuses less on realism of depth than on realism of movement.”
**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**
**As featured on Feedspot’s 25 Best London Education Podcasts**

Episode 137 appropriately begins at the end of the commercially and critically successful Indiana Jones franchise with this discussion of the fifth and final feature Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (James Mangold, 2023) featuring special guest Dr Sarah Thomas. Sarah is Senior Lecturer in Communication and Media in the School of Arts, whose research expertise centres on stardom/celebrity, media industries, and screen performance in Hollywood and transnational cinemas. She is the author of James Mason (BFI, 2018), Peter Lorre - Face Maker: Constructing Stardom and Performance in Hollywood and Europe (Berghahn Books, 2012), and the edited collection Cult Film Stardom: Offbeat Attractions and Processes of Cultification (Palgrave MacMillan, 2012) with Kate Egan. In this podcast episode, the conversation turns to Harrison Ford’s star image and the representation of aged physicality onscreen; digital de-aging and the computerised replication of celebrity; ‘legacy’ cinema and the star’s role in supporting the continuity of a franchise; the impact of the film’s thematic “fissures in time” on the construction of narrative jeopardy; and how Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny uses images and icons of the past to disappear into its own sense of history.
**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**
**As featured on Feedspot’s 25 Best London Education Podcasts**

Chris and Alex once again draw on the expertise of Dr Peter Kunze (Tulane University) for this discussion of the form and function of the period critically and culturally known as the Disney Renaissance. Listen as they reflect on the complex and often contradictory place of the Renaissance as a crucial phase of renewal within Disney’s own internal history; the contribution made to the studio’s animated features by the repeating presence of key creative personnel; the influential role of Broadway upon Disney’s corporate synergy and the formal interplay between a ‘Broadway style’ and 1980s and 1990s cartoon aesthetics; and the cultural politics of the Renaissance as a phase of Hollywood animation that can be mapped onto Disney’s own multicultural negotiation of diversity and inclusion.
**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**
**As featured on Feedspot’s 25 Best London Education Podcasts**

The author of Staging a Comeback: Broadway, Hollywood, and the Disney Renaissance (Rutgers University Press, 2023), Dr Peter Kunze (Tulane University), is the special guest for Episode 136 of the podcast which looks at the impact of Walt Disney’s Beauty and the Beast (Gary Trousdale & Kirk Wise, 1991) and both the industrial and stylistic stakes of the film’s adoption of a Broadway style of musical arrangement. Topics include the film’s place within the Disney Renaissance period of the studio’s animated features and the role of key figures like Michael Eisner, Jeffrey Katzenberg, Howard Ashman, and Alan Menken; corporate synergy and the top-down reimagining of Disney’s production strategies during the 1980s and 1990s; song, dance, and the film’s casting of established Broadway voices; the application of emergent computer animation and digital VFX to the presentation and realisation of the film’s musical numbers; and how Beauty and the Beast adapts both the original fairytale and the later fantasy La Belle et la Bête (Jean Cocteau, 1946) in ways that illustrated the contemporary state and status of the musical genre in Hollywood.
**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**
**As featured on Feedspot’s 25 Best London Education Podcasts**