Fantasy/Animation

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**

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**

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**

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**

Episode 166 of the Fantasy/Animation podcast high kicks its way into the world of DreamWorks’ successful Kung Fu Panda franchise (2008-) with this look at the series’ first big-screen instalment, Kung Fu Panda (John Stevenson & Mark Osborne, 2008), with very special guest John Yorke. John is a television producer, screenwriter, editor, and author, who was Head of Channel 4 Drama (2003–2005), controller of BBC drama production (2006–2012) where he founded the BBC Writers Academy, and more recently managing director of Company Pictures (2013–2015). He is now teaching screenwriting via his own company, John Yorke Story, and is the author of Into the Woods: How Stories Work and Why We Tell Them (Penguin, 2014) and Trip to the Moon: Understanding the True Power of Story (Penguin, 2026). Topics include the tension between showing and telling that underpins the character development of Kung Fu Panda’s protagonist Po (Jack Black); story as central to the film’s effectiveness as a martial arts animated comedy and the spectacle of the animated body in physicalising certain narrative beats; storytelling within a commercial animation context and how the medium’s narrative strategies are enabled by animation as an industrial art form; and how Kung Fu Panda functions as a popular fantasy film merging Chinese with American cultural concerns yet remains indebted to longstanding folkloric structures of narrative. This podcast is sponsored by the project “UK-China Animation: Co-Creating Research and Knowledge Exchange,” led by the University of Nottingham and funded by the British Council through an award from its Going Global Partnerships programme, which builds stronger, more inclusive, internationally connected higher education and Technical and Vocational Education and Training systems (TVET). **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**

Just as it did to kick off 2025, the Fantasy/Animation podcast returns once again following the festive break to celebrate the New Year with another visit to Oz, with Chris and Alex reflecting on movie musical Wicked: For Good (John M. Chu, 2025) that as with the first instalment released in 2024 discussed a year ago adapts Stephen Schwartz’s successful 2003 theatre production. Topics for this first episode of 2026 include Wicked: For Good’s heightened reflexivity around performance, deception, and the power of illusions that take place in front of and behind the curtain; Elphaba’s political radicalism vs. the pragmatism of Glinda; necropolitical action and the film’s targeting of who gets to live and who must die; ‘wickedness’ and the emptiness (and reclaiming) of language; and where Wicked: For Good succeeds - and ultimately fails - as it seeks to find its own narrative in the intriguing ellipses of the Oz lore. **Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo** **As featured on Feedspot’s 25 Best London Education Podcasts**

Sound, performance, and the body come together in this Footnote episode discussing pantomime as an entertainment spectacle, as Chris and Alex seek to map the possible connections between pantomime as a popular theatrical tradition emerging in the 17th century and both animation’s own technologies and representations and legacies of fantasy. Topics include classical antiquity, gesture, and choric dramas; European precursors like commedia dell’arte and féerie stories; the invested interest by early animation scholarship in the medium’s multiple genealogies and the role of pantomime in defining animated points of origin; and how the self-reflexive staging and gestures of pantomime came to influence the different visual and comedy stylings of cartoon storytelling. **Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo** **As featured on Feedspot’s 25 Best London Education Podcasts**