Fantasy/Animation

Fantasy/Animation

Christopher Holliday is Senior Lecturer in Liberal Arts and Visual Cultures Education at King’s College London (UK). Alexander Sergeant is a Lecturer in Digital Media Production at the University of Westminster (UK), specialising in the history and theory of fantasy cinema. Each episode, they look in detail at a film or television show, taking listeners on a journey through the intersection between fantasy cinema and the medium of animation.

  1. 12h ago

    Digger (2026)

    Chris and Alex disrupt their normal programming schedule to bring you this recently recorded (and very last minute) podcast episode on Digger (Alejandro González Iñárritu, 2026), the divisive political satire and black comedy still playing in cinemas. The film plots the trials and tribulations of boorish Digger Rockwell, a billionaire oil tycoon whose Arctic drilling triggers a global catastrophe in Greenland. Yet its narrative tells only part of its story - Digger’s poor box office return and growing reputation as a big-budget misfire reflects the many polarised opinions that it has generated, which both target its self-indulgence and heavy-handed political commentary while praising its ambition and screen performances. Topics for this spoiler-filled instalment include distanciation, provocation, and the success of its reflexive storytelling strategies; visual effects as a symbol of artifice and the labour of persuasive prosthetic aging; Tom Cruise’s star persona and traditions in the big-screen ‘animation’ of his face; narrative layering and the film’s rhetoric of fantasy as it is mapped against a split narrative of ecological disaster and national trauma; and what the struggles both in front of and behind the camera reveal about Digger as a treatise on humanity, accountability, and insanity. **Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo** **As featured on Feedspot’s 25 Best London Education Podcasts** **As featured on MillionPodcast’s Best 10 UK Animation Podcasts and Best 60 Movie Podcasts in the UK**

  2. Oct 12

    Footnote #81 - The Studio System

    The Fantasy/Animation footnotes return after the summer break with Footnote #81 that maps the studio system as an organising principle and defining industrial structure of Classical Hollywood production between the 1920s and 1960s, and a term that pertains to the rise of industrialised, consumer-focused, and globalised filmmaking practices. Topics for this episode include Fordist models of mass production and the role of studios, stars, and genres as repeating constants; the mechanics of vertical integration and the prestige of the ‘Big Five’/’Little Three’; the importance of theatrical exhibition and distribution, and the profitable chain where films travel from the production lot to the movie theatre; and the collapse of the system and its re-emergence in a contemporary animation era where studio recognition adheres to something of a Classical template. **Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo** **As featured on Feedspot’s 25 Best London Education Podcasts** **As featured on MillionPodcast’s Best 10 UK Animation Podcasts and Best 60 Movie Podcasts in the UK**

  3. Oct 5

    Enchanted (2007)

    The brand new series of the Fantasy/Animation podcast kicks off with this opening look at Disney’s celebrated animated/live-action musical Enchanted (Kevin Lima, 2007), a film that cleverly negotiates Disney’s history and prestige as a global animation studio by parodying the Classic cartoons of Hollywood’s Golden Age and offering audiences a comedic pastiche of the Mouse House’s very own Renaissance era animated features. Topics for Chris and Alex to grapple with in this episode include Disney’s careful curating of their history and the question of branding and authorship; sincerity and Enchanted’s function as a form of Disney revisionism; the importance of the film’s 2007 release and the role of fantasy in the Disney/Pixar corporate merger; gender, femininity, and creative labour; intrusive vs. portal quest fantasy as it plays out in contemporary New York; the drama of mixed media hybridity; and the codes and conventions of Enchanted’s “fairytale nonsense” that allows it to openly declare its use of animation as fantasy. **Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo** **As featured on Feedspot’s 25 Best London Education Podcasts** **As featured on MillionPodcast’s Best 10 UK Animation Podcasts and Best 60 Movie Podcasts in the UK**

  4. Jul 20

    Archive Episode - Inception (2010) (with Todd McGowan)

    To coincide with the recent big-screen release of The Odyssey (Christopher Nolan, 2026), the final Fantasy/Animation archive episode of the summer looks back the filmmaker’s science-fiction blockbuster Inception (Christopher Nolan, 2010) that featured as its special guest Todd McGowan, Professor of Film Studies in the Film and Television Studies Department at the University of Vermont. Todd is the author of a number of books on psychoanalytic film theory, film comedy and popular media, including The Real Gaze: Film Theory after Lacan (2007) and The Fictional Christopher Nolan (2012), and joined Chris and Alex back in 2021 to discuss the fantasy of dreams, Inception’s rhizomatic, mazelike narrative structure, and Nolan’s commitment to puzzling plotlines, the reconstitution of beginnings, and practical effects imagery. **Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo** **As featured on Feedspot’s 25 Best London Education Podcasts** **As featured on MillionPodcast’s Best 10 UK Animation Podcasts and Best 60 Movie Podcasts in the UK**

  5. Jul 6

    Archive Episode - Waltz with Bashir (2008) (with Bella Honess Roe)

    The next archive episode of the Fantasy/Animation podcast goes all the way back to Episode 24 and the discussion of the celebrated animated documentary Waltz with Bashir (Ari Folman, 2008) which featured a conversation with special guest Dr Bella Honess Roe, author of the influential book Animated Documentary (2013). Listen as the trio discuss the recent industrial and scholarly turn towards animated documentary and the medium’s capabilities for representing the real; discourses of trauma and what it means to ‘animate’ dreams and a national-cultural memory; combinations of the factual and the fantastical that are weaved throughout Ari Folman’s autobiographical narrative; and how Waltz with Bashir illustrates animation’s status as a creative medium of catharsis. **Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo** **As featured on Feedspot’s 25 Best London Education Podcasts** **As featured on MillionPodcast’s Best 10 UK Animation Podcasts and Best 60 Movie Podcasts in the UK**

  6. Jun 22

    Archive Episode - Toy Story (1995) (with Lucy Fife Donaldson)

    For this second archive episode, Chris and Alex revisit Episode 138 of the podcast that gave listeners their first taste of Pixar’s Toy Story (1995-) franchise thanks to this look at the 1995 original. The discussion of Pixar’s debut feature featured as its special guest Lucy Fife Donaldson, who is now Professor of Film Studies at the University of St Andrews and whose work focuses on film and television style, audiovisual design and 'below-the-line' labour, performance and the body. Topics in this episode included a closer look at the textures, surfaces, and scuff marks of Toy Story and its peripheral detail rendered in pristine computer graphics; worldhood and the toys’ own journey through digital space; play and plasticity; and the stylistic potential of registers of miniaturisation and magnification. **Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo** **As featured on Feedspot’s 25 Best London Education Podcasts** **As featured on MillionPodcast’s Best 10 UK Animation Podcasts and Best 60 Movie Podcasts in the UK**

  7. Jun 8

    Archive Episode - The Prince of Egypt (1998) (with Francesca Stavrakopoulou)

    To celebrate the summer, Chris and Alex take another trawl through the Fantasy/Animation archive to pick out some of their favourite past instalments of the podcast. For this first archive episode for 2026, they turn to their discussion of The Prince of Egypt (Brenda Chapman, Steve Hickner & Simon Wells, 1998) that took place way back in March 2021 that featured the insights of biblical scholar and broadcaster Francesca Stavrakopoulou, who is Professor of Hebrew Bible and Ancient Religion at the University of Exeter. Listen again at their analysis of this 1998 cel-animated and CG epic that took in conversations about musicality, animated adaptations, star voices, spectacle, and myth-making, as well as the film’s contribution to the industrial standing of DreamWorks as a successful Hollywood studio, the politics of white-washing and colour-coding, and the stylistic mobilisation of Christian iconography. **Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo** **As featured on Feedspot’s 25 Best London Education Podcasts** **As featured on MillionPodcast’s Best 10 UK Animation Podcasts and Best 60 Movie Podcasts in the UK**

  8. May 26

    Footnote #80 - Netflix

    Building off the recent podcast on KPop Demon Hunters (Maggie Kang & Chris Appelhans, 2025), Footnote #80 examines Netflix as a popular digital platform via both the context (and illusion) of choice and the algorithmic processes that create, tailor, and appeal to our audiovisual desires, but equally Netflix’s contribution to the contemporary landscape of media production and consumption. Topics include Netflix as a gatekeeper that manages and shapes our access to ‘content’; the digital architecture of streaming platforms and how their optimised capabilities for providing highly personalised recommendations interpellates the user into its structures; the politics of ‘making’ taste and questions of authorship; default narratives of loss and gain that frame digital forms of innovation; Netflix Animation as an emerging production studio; and what the curated library of platform content tells us about industrial and cultural categorisation of fantasy and animation. **Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo** **As featured on Feedspot’s 25 Best London Education Podcasts** **As featured on MillionPodcast’s Best 10 UK Animation Podcasts and Best 60 Movie Podcasts in the UK**

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About

Christopher Holliday is Senior Lecturer in Liberal Arts and Visual Cultures Education at King’s College London (UK). Alexander Sergeant is a Lecturer in Digital Media Production at the University of Westminster (UK), specialising in the history and theory of fantasy cinema. Each episode, they look in detail at a film or television show, taking listeners on a journey through the intersection between fantasy cinema and the medium of animation.

Information

  • Creator
    Fantasy/Animation
  • Years Active
    2018 - 2026
  • Episodes
    277
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © Copyright 2018 All rights reserved.
  • Show Website
    Fantasy/Animation

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