Fantasy/Animation

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**

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**

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**

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**

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**