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.

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20 episodes
Avg 47 min
English

Episodes 20

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July 20 · 1 hr 16 min
Archive Episode - Inception (Christopher Nolan, 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**
July 6 · 59 min
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**
June 22 · 1 hr 5 min
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**
June 8 · 1 hr 16 min
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**
May 26 · 14 min
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**
#174
May 18 · 1 hr 11 min
KPop Demon Hunters (2025)
The final episode of the current series of the podcast addresses the phenomenon of KPop Demon Hunters (Maggie Kang & Chris Appelhans, 2025), the most watched original animated film of all time on Netflix whose global reach, critical and commercial success, and intensified fandom has positioned it as central to the contemporary ‘Korean Wave’ marked by the international visibility and popularity of cultural exports produced by South Korea. In this instalment, Chris and Alex discuss the diversity of aesthetic styles that defines KPop Demon Hunters and how its design fits into post-Spider-Verse computer-animated filmmaking; images of manufacture and performance, and how they contribute to a highly reflexive engagement with the industry and business of pop music; the emphasis placed on the labour of creativity at the expense of physicality; the politics of female friendship and big-screen shift towards the “girlfriend action flick”; how the narrative’s celebration of a Golden Honmoon illustrates the pleasures of communality, collaboration, and joy; and what the didacticism of KPop Demon Hunters has to say about the struggles in finding your voice and ultimately defeating your demons. **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**
May 11 · 13 min
Footnote #79 - Orientalism
For Footnote #79, Chris and Alex engage the seminal work of Edward Said and his coining and development of Orientalism as a critical framework for mapping the acceptance of the presence of a distinction between East and West, and the terms under which such a geographical and, crucially, conceptual division has been understood. Topics include the emergence of an Orientalist rhetoric during the 1970s and its alignment with psychoanalysis; the West’s constructed image of the East as the manifestation of what Gerald Sim calls a “European unconscious” and its identity as a repressed, hidden, and mystical Other; the implications for an essentialist attitude towards the Middle East, Asia, North Africa powered by the decorative - rather than in-depth - view of Arab “customs” and traditions; the value of Orientalism to Film Studies and its histories of representation in defining the “foreign”; and the Orient as a “repository” for certain types of colonialist and post-colonialist fantasies. **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**
#173
May 4 · 1 hr 3 min
Kirikou and the Sorceress (1998) (with Lewis C. Seifert)
For Episode 173, Chris and Alex introduce the films of Michel Ocelot with this close look at the filmmaker’s successful animated adventure film - loosely based on a West African folktale - Kirikou and the Sorceress (Michel Ocelot, 1998). The discussion into the film’s articulation of magical realism, power, and struggle features special guest Lewis C. Seifert, who is Professor of French and Francophone Studies at Brown University. Lewis’ research interests encompass early Modern France, gender and sexuality studies, folk narratives, and the environmental humanities, and he is the author of Fairy Tales, Sexuality, and Gender in France, 1690-1715: Nostalgic Utopias (Cambridge University Press, 1996) and Manning the Margins: Masculinity and Writing in Seventeenth-Century France (University of Michigan Press, 2009). Listen as the trio reflect on hyperrealism, Ocelot’s expressive and experimental pictorial styles, and the structural influence of fables upon the narrative; registers of innocence and intelligence in the depiction of Kirikou; tensions between the individual and the disassociation of community, alongside the function of empathy and superstition within the status of magic; and the possible risks of reading Kirikou and the Sorceress through a predominantly orientalist and essentialist lens. **This episode was produced and edited by Menelik Thaim-Lee* **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**
April 27 · 13 min
Footnote #78 - The Imagination
Footnote #78 of the podcast focuses on the imagination as Alex takes Chris through the world of generative cognition and the many philosophical reflections that discuss our mental forces, which in turn allow us to conjure ideas, thoughts, concepts, and images that do not exist in the material world. Topics include early film theory and the question of imagined depth; the ‘use’ of the imagination to imagine and the distinction between imagination as a way to escape or transcend the real vs. a productive way to interrogate the world; the force of the imagination as a tool of meaning making, and the power in daydreaming certain fanciful ideas; cinema as an imaginary medium and the longstanding coding of fantasy as a genre of the imagination; and the productive tension between indulging or curtailing imagination with regards to the assumed non-realist and non-rational logic of fantasy cinema. **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**
#172
April 20 · 1 hr 18 min
Helen Hill (with Karen Redrobe)
The Fantasy/Animation podcast welcomes as its special guest for Episode 172 Professor Karen Redrobe, who is Elliot and Roslyn Jaffe Professor and Undergraduate Chair in the Department of Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Her work traverses film theory, animation, and feminism, and she is the author of Vanishing Women: Magic, Film, and Feminism (2003) and the new book Undead: (Inter)(in)animation, Feminisms, and the Art of War (2025), as well as editor of Animating Film Theory (2014) and Deep Mediations: Thinking Space in Cinema and Digital Cultures (2021, with Jeff Scheible). In this instalment, Karen introduces Chris and Alex to the life and career of the artist and filmmaker Helen Hill, who died in 2007 aged only 36, but whose ebullient imagination on display across her experimental shorts pushed at the boundaries of direct animation, stop-motion, and do-it-yourself methods of animated filmmaking. Listen as the trio discuss Hill's last short The Florestine Collection (2011) completed by her husband Paul Gailiunas, alongside earlier works Mouseholes (1999), and Madame Winger Makes A Film (2001), to reflect on mixed media film as a negotiation of trauma and mode of catharsis; unfinished animation and the political act of recovery; film-based activism, education, and the interpretive form of experimental animation; pantomime aesthetics and the role of paper, puppets, fabric and ‘stuff’ in crafting worlds that only animation can access; and the playfulness of Hill’s animated experiments and projects that expressed not just her delight in life but confronted what it means for a community to have filmmaking at its centre. **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**
April 13 · 12 min
Footnote #77 - Expanded Animation
What might it mean for animation to ‘expand’? Footnote 77 confronts the performances and technologies of expanded animation, a term that speaks to both the broadening out of animation and its many sites of production, exhibition, and consumption, as well as those intermedial or multimedia live works that involve different kinds of animated images. Topics include the expansion of cinema in the 1950s and 1960s that pushed film beyond ‘conventional’ single-screen narratives and engaged more sensory, interactive, and immersive environments; the value and appeal of animated projections and art installations that break the one-way relation between audience and screen, often using the artist’s live and living body on stage; shifting temporalities and the fleeting existence of site-specific animation with its new (even hesitating) exhibition practices; connections between expanded, pervasive, and useful animation; and how expanding animation allows us to think more readily about its identity as a fine art alongside its form and function in everything from architectural schools and education to retail spaces. **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**
#171
April 6 · 1 hr 8 min
Immersive Experiences and The Sphere Las Vegas (with Tim Jones)
The latest episode of the Fantasy/Animation podcast marvels at the era of technologically-powered immersive experiences and high-tech live concert performances through a case study of the Sphere Las Vegas, whose 16K resolution/160,000-square-foot wraparound screen was announced via a series of 40 virtual reality concerts held by U2 between September 2023 to March 2024. Joining Chris and Alex as they navigate these new forms of concert illusion is Dr Tim Jones, an Assistant Professor of Media Arts at Robert Morris University who specialises in animation, film history, media production, and Virtual and Augmented Reality (VR/AR) experience design. Topics include fantastic environments and the aesthetic principles of immersion; the promise of limitlessness when liveness and animation collide, and the resultant spectacle of domed displays; site specificity, aura, and the scale of collective experiences; distinctions between contemplation and distraction; and how the Las Vegas Sphere operates as an expensive party trick that helps us understand animation’s own sacred spaces and sensory overloads. **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**
March 30 · 16 min
Footnote #76 - Performativity
Performativity gets the Fantasy/Animation treatment in Footnote 76 of the podcast, with Alex taking Chris through the power and implication of language, utterances, meaning, and those writers who have thought about how we do things with words. Topics include how language is essential to the creation of meaning in the world and the emergence of ordinary language philosophy; performative registers, speech acts, and the work of Judith Butler on gendered forms of performativity; fictions, falsehoods, and the societal function of performing gender; and the meaningfulness of utterances that create meaning by doing rather than simply describing. **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**
#170
March 23 · 1 hr 14 min
SuperTed (1982-1986) (with Elain Price)
Special guest Dr. Elain Price (Senior Lecturer in Media Studies, Swansea University) joins Chris and Alex for this rundown of SuperTed (Mike Young, 1982-1986) where they reflect on the series’ contribution to - and place within - histories of animation, including its influence upon the development of Welsh animation production over the last 40 years. Focusing on the episodes “SuperTed and the Inca Treasure” (S1E1, 1982), “SuperTed and the Giant Kites” (S1E4, 1983) and “SuperTed on Planet Spot” (S1E12, 1983), topics for Episode 170 include Elain’s own work on Welsh-language television channel S4C (the first to be aimed at a Welsh-speaking audience) and the broadcast of SuperTed on the first night of the channel in 1982; industry, investment, and the marketing of Mike Young’s television adaptation of his own childen’s books; links between the anthropomorphic character of SuperTed and Sid Griffith’s silent-era Welsh cartoon series Jerry the Troublesome Tyke (1925-1927); regional fantasy and parochial Welsh representation; and what SuperTed can tell us about national identity and the transportable nature of children’s television more broadly. **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**
March 16 · 14 min
Footnote #75 - Identification
Chris and Alex reflect on the question of identification in this latest Footnote episode of the podcast, drawing out what it means to identify (or not) with characters as both fictional agents and a set of archetypes. Topics include recognition and the comprehension of emotion; cognitive film theory and the schema of identification rooted in physical proximity, emotional connection, and the sharing of moral values and worldview; the distinction between subjectivity, alignment, and allegiance often complicated through point-of-view shots; examples where spectators may share a character’s subjectivity, and be aligned with them, but not hold an allegiance; and how identification is more than just seeing the world through someone’s eyes but in the case of non-figurative animation and fantasy can be conceived haptically through bodily and sensorial affect. **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**
#169
March 9 · 1 hr 12 min
Leeds Animation Workshop (with Terry Wragg)
Episode 169 marks the Fantasy/Animation podcast’s first engagement with the work of the Leeds Animation Workshop, a pioneering women’s animation collective formally established in 1978 to produce and distribute animated films on a variety of social, cultural, and educational issues. A not-for-profit, grassroots cooperative, the Workshop has been at the forefront in developing animation’s role as a tool for activism and action, not just organising screenings and providing workshops for adults and young people, but working “in consultation with organisations and individuals” to specialise "in making complex or sensitive issues more accessible to audiences, and at times offering an alternative point of view.” Chris and Alex are delighted to be joined in this episode by one of the Leeds Animation Workshop’s founding members, Terry Wragg, who recounts the often-tumultuous history of the Workshop and its desire to provoke discussion and debate through the study of three of its key works: Gives Us a Smile (1983), which depicts the daily harassment of women and includes quotes taken from real police cases and interviews; Bridging the Gap (2001), an examination of tensions between parents and their teenage children narrated by Michael Rosen; and They Call Us Maids (2015), a collaboration with Justice 4 Domestic Workers based on the real life stories of thousands of migrant women. **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**
March 2 · 14 min
Footnote #74 - Deconstructivism
Following the recent podcast episode on Space Ghost Coast to Coast (Mike Lazzo, 1994-2008), Alex takes the reins for Fantasy/Animation Footnote 74, taking Chris through Jacques Derrida and deconstructivism as a philosophical doctrine, which embraces a way of interpretive thinking that is loosely tasked with exposing the lack of meaning within meaning itself and pushing against the clear resolution of a thesis. Topics include the erasure of meaning as reliant on other sets or circuits of meaning; signifiers and chains of signification, and the role of the deconstructivist in reflecting on and exposing those chains; deconstructive animation as a generic deep structure of animation and the cartoon’s history and comedy of anti-illusionism; and how deconstructivist analysis as a reading strategy might work to unpack animation’s complex relationship to live-action and, ultimately, to itself. **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**
#168
February 23 · 1 hr 6 min
Space Ghost Coast to Coast (1994-2008) (with Jacqueline Ristola)
In Episode 168 of the podcast, Chris and Alex are delighted to be joined by Dr Jacqueline Ristola, Lecturer in the Department of Film and Television at the University of Bristol, to discuss the Cartoon Network’s adult live-action/animated talkshow parody Space Ghost Coast to Coast (Mike Lazzo, 1994-2008). With research areas including animation, anime studies, media industry studies, and queer representation, Jacqueline is the ideal guest to introduce listeners to the surrealist tone, irreverent comedy, and generic subversions of Space Ghost, with a focus in this instalment on the specific episodes “Sleeper” (S2E7) (1995), “Rehearsal” (S4E1) (1997), and “Fire Ant” (S6E6) (1999). Listen as they discuss Space Ghost’s carnival qualities and the role of fantasy-as-critique; media conglomeration, the U.S. talk show wars, and Adult Swim; the labour of cut-and-paste and limited animation as a stylistic advantage; and how the meta-commentary of Space Ghost represents an abrasive challenge to the flow and form of conventional television 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**
February 16 · 12 min
Footnote #73 - Rotoscoping
Footnote 73 looks at animation’s historical relationship to the body and how physicality was transcribed via the rotoscoping process as part of the construction of the earliest animated characters. From the Fleischer Studios pioneering the technology for use in their Out of the Inkwell series of shorts (1918–1927) and later feature films Gulliver's Travels (David Fleischer, 1939), and Mr. Bug Goes to Town (Dave Fleischer, 1941), through to Bob Sabiston’s digital homage to rotoscoping when developing the Rotoshop tool during the 1990s, this episode has Chris take Alex through the mechanics of projecting performances onto glass to be traced by the animators to craft their animated performances. Topics include what the rotoscope contributed to animation’s hyper-realist aesthetic and the specific desire for naturalism at Disney; rotoscoping’s connection to both the Rotoshop and contemporary motion capture techniques; and how the rotoscope negotiates the uncanny, haunting presence of the human beneath the image. **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**
#167
February 9 · 1 hr 10 min
AI and Animation (with Mihaela Mihailova)
The creative - and highly controversial - relationship between animation and artificial intelligence provides the focus of Episode 167 of the Fantasy/Animation podcast, which features as its special guest Dr Mihaela Mihailova, an Assistant Professor in the School of Cinema at San Francisco State University. Mihaela is the editor of Coraline: A Closer Look at Studio LAIKA’s Stop-Motion Witchcraft (Bloomsbury, 2021), whose work has also appeared in the Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, The Velvet Light Trap, Journal of Japanese and Korean Cinema, Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies, Feminist Media Studies, animation: an interdisciplinary journal, Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema, and [in]Transition. She has contributed to Animating Film Theory (with John MacKay), The Oxford Handbook of the Disney Musical, Animated Landscapes: History, Form, and Function, The Animation Studies Reader, and Drawn from Life: Issues and Themes in Animated Documentary Cinema, and was editor of the recent “AI and the Moving Image” dossier published in the Journal of Cinema and Media Studies. She is currently co-editor of Animation Studies and serves as co-President of the Society for Animation Studies. Listen as Mihaela introduces Chris and Alex to the AI-generated short films Generation (2022), PLSTC (2022), Bruegel the Younger (2022), and Dissolution (2023) as a backdrop to thinking about the trajectory of machine learning in relation to animated imagery and creative practice; the aesthetics and implications for labour prompted by AI as both an assistive and generative tool; the discourses of technophilia and technophobia that surround contemporary synthetic media; and what impact the ‘open secret’ of AI might have within the animation industry beyond some of its current applications. **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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