Fantasy/Animation Fantasy/Animation

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 141 returns to the contemporary era of Disney Feature Animation with this discussion of the computer-animated musical blockbuster Frozen (Chris Buck & Jennifer Lee, 2013), a fairytale film of female empowerment that is widely credited with ushering in Disney’s Third Golden Age of animated features after the ‘Classic’ Disney period and earlier Disney Renaissance. The special guest for this instalment is Dr Eve Benhamou, teaching fellow in Film Studies at the University Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3, France who has previously taught at the Bristol School of Animation and Swansea University. Eve’s research concerns the intersection of Disney, Hollywood, and gender - ideas central to her first monograph Contemporary Disney Animation: Genre, Gender and Hollywood (EUP, 2022) which examines the “multifaceted interactions between animated films, Disney properties such as Pixar and Marvel, and popular genres including the romantic comedy, the superhero film and the cop buddy film.” Topics for this episode include Frozen’s negotiation of the longstanding Disney formula and how such a blueprint impacts the film’s identity as both ‘classic’ and ‘typical’ Disney; gender, genre, and the portrayal of girl power and sisterhood through the Anna/Elsa relationship; recent turns towards Baroque aesthetics in Disney’s post-Frozen computer-animated features; stylistic overlaps with the musical performances of Wicked; and what the sustained cultural power of Frozen has to say about the Disney corporation in twenty-first-century America.
**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**
**As featured on Feedspot’s 25 Best London Education Podcasts**

Footnote 49 looks at the fascinating figure of the cyborg as an embodiment of hybridity, resistance, and rebellion, interrogating the role of cyborgs as surrogate figurations that representing disparate forms of identity within both popular media culture and social reality. Chris and Alex begin by discussing the cyborg as the provocative integration of artificial components and technologies with the human, before asking where and how the image of the cyborg appears throughout cinema history. This includes a look at its metaphorical role within and beyond science-fiction and fantasy; the cyborg as the increasing locus for current cultural debates about race, gender, and sexuality; and the politics of the cyborg as a reflection of the possibilities of liminal identities that are ‘caught between’ the normative.
 **Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**
**As featured on Feedspot’s 25 Best London Education Podcasts**

Professor Yvonne Tasker is the very special guest for Episode 140 of the podcast, joining Chris and Alex for this discussion of action spectacle and the gendered body in science-fiction sequel Terminator 2: Judgment Day (James Cameron, 1991). Across several foundational publications that have interrogated the intersections between genre and gender, including the monographs Spectacular Bodies: Gender, Genre and Action Cinema (Routledge, 1993) and Working Girls: Gender and Sexuality in Popular Cinema (Routledge, 1998) and the edited anthology The Hollywood Action and Adventure Film (Wiley-Blackwell, 2015), Professor Tasker’s research has explored the convergence of feminism and gender cultures through popular media. Topics for this instalment include Terminator 2: Judgment Day’s presentation of the female body and 1980s Hollywood “muscularity”; technofuturist vs. simulationist registers of VFX imagery in Hollywood’s “wonder years”; the metamorphosing T-1000 and the formal presentation of computer-generated imagery; the place of James Cameron’s science-fiction epic within broader Hollywood histories of the genre and overlaps with the war movie; and what Terminator 2 has to say about computers given its defining treatment of an international technological threat.
**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**
**As featured on Feedspot’s 25 Best London Education Podcasts**

Having already tackled the topic of special effects in an earlier Footnote, this latest episode instead focuses on visual effects (VFX) as a way to think through the practical/digital distinction that has come to culturally and industrially define the specificity and spectacle of VFX imagery. Topics include the rise of digital technologies and their ubiquity in contemporary moving image culture; crisis narratives of the virtual supplanting evidence of ‘in-camera’ labour from motion-capture to machine learning; categorisations of ‘special’ and ‘visual’ from within Hollywood and what this says about the broader recognition of the contribution of effects artists; and the marketing of contemporary blockbusters according to an emerging anti-VFX agenda.
 **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**