For the final archive episode of 2025, Chris and Alex once again swing their way back into the superhero world of Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (Bob Persichetti, Peter Ramsey & Rodney Rothman, 2018), revisiting their discussion of Sony Pictures Animation’s computer-animated film that featured special guest Simran Hans, film critic and culture writer whose work has appeared in The Observer, The Guardian, Buzzfeed, Dazed, The Fader and Sight & Sound. Lots here on Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse’s unique comic book-style design and the visual “crunch” of its evocative flattened style; the upturned generic qualities of the computer-animated film within contemporary Hollywood; and the growing pervasiveness of superhero cinema that, since the film’s release, has become further reinvigorated by Spider-Verse’s now highly influential design.

Chris and Alex go all the way back to 2020 for the penultimate archive episode of the podcast for this summer, remembering their discussion of Ralph Bakshi’s high fantasy animated epic Wizards (Ralph Bakshi, 1977), which was originally recorded in front of a live audience at the Cinema Museum in Kennington, London in January 2020. Released first time around as Episode 42, the conversation turned to Wizards as a counter-cultural marvel of the 1970s; the politics and propaganda of the film’s adult themes, including its discourses of socio-realism and gender politics; technology versus magic; and the status of Wizards as a masterpiece of U.S. animation.

**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**

**As featured on Feedspot’s 25 Best London Education Podcasts**

To coincide with the release of Pixar’s science-fiction computer-animated feature Elio (Madeline Sharafian, Domee Shi & Adrian Molina, 2025) this summer, Chris and Alex take listeners back a decade to 2015 and the emotional worlds created by the studio’s earlier Inside Out (Pete Docter, 2015). Originally recorded at the 33rd annual Society for Animation Studies conference at Teesside University (and released soon after in October 2022), this episode featured as its special guest Dr. Eric Herhuth, Assistant Professor of Communication and Director of Film Studies at Tulane University, and author of Pixar and the Aesthetic Imagination: Animation, Storytelling, and Digital Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2017). Relisten to hear the trio discussing animation’s longstanding propensity for metaphor and political allegory; the film’s 11-year-old protagonist Riley and the youthfulness of emotion; and the stakes of Inside Out as a film that encourages audiences to accept both the sadness of joy and the joy of sadness.

**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**

**As featured on Feedspot’s 25 Best London Education Podcasts**

For this second archive episode, Chris and Alex revisit Episode 81 of the podcast that gave listeners a quickfire journey through Sub-Saharan African animation with Paula Callus, a Professor in the National Centre for Computer Animation at Bournemouth University and an expert in Sub-Saharan African animation. The films covered in this instalment were Moustapha Alassane’s Bon Voyage Sim (1966), Ng’endo Mukii’s Yellow Fever (2013), Iwa (2009) from Nigerian filmmaker, illustrator and art director Kenneth (Shofela) Coker, the British/Kenyan animated television series Tinga Tinga Tales (2010-2012), and the science-fiction allegory Pumzi (2009) from writer and director Wanuri Kahiu. Lots here on the cultural and historical specificity of fantasy storytelling, global animation practices, and the post-colonial legacies that guide how African animation has been culturally and critically understood.

**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**

**As featured on Feedspot’s 25 Best London Education Podcasts**

To mark the return of the Fantasy/Animation archive instalments, Chris and Alex once more delve into the podcast’s back catalogue for this relisten of Episode 70 and their discussion of Space Jam (Joe Pytka, 1996), which featured very special guest Professor Paul Wells, Director of the Animation Academy at Loughborough University. Listen again at their analysis of Space Jam as emblematic of animation’s longstanding relationship with sport; the nostalgic callbacks that the film makes to Golden Age Hollywood stardom; sport, drama, metaphor, and society; Space Jam’s soundtrack and negotiation of black celebrity identities; and how Joe Pytka’s film provides the spectacle of stylistic hybridity through the lens of NBA basketball.

**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**

**As featured on Feedspot’s 25 Best London Education Podcasts**

The current cultural “pervasiveness” of animated media and the medium’s durable status as a vital intermediary between ‘us’ and ‘the world’ is the focus of this latest Footnote episode, which tackles “Pervasive Animation” as it has been understood within Suzanne Buchan’s 2013 anthology of the same name. Chris takes Alex through the requisite methodological challenges, considerations, and conundrums when looking at animation’s many forms within contemporary moving image culture, as well as what Buchan says about the need to push animation’s multiplicity of definitions towards aesthetic and critical intersections with everything from fine art and sculpture to videogames and medical imaging. Other topics include what this critical re-conceptualisation means for the variant sites, spaces, and interfaces of animation beyond the screen; how interdisciplinarity can critically account for the “pervasive” spread of animation and the possibility of academically studying the medium outside Film and Media Studies; and what all this means for animation itself as a complex and chaotic scholarly object.

**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**

**As featured on Feedspot’s 25 Best London Education Podcasts**

This podcast special was recorded live at the recent Popular Culture Association Conference in New Orleans, USA, April 2025, where Alex was delighted to be asked to participate in a roundtable discussion on Amazon’s prequel series The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power (Patrick McKay & J.D. Payne, 2022-). In a detour from our usual format, Alex is without Chris but joined by two fellow panelists, Alicia Fox-Lenz and Tim Lenz (both stewards of the Mythopoeic Society), alongside an enthusiastic room full of popular culture scholars taking part in a freewheeling and open discussion about the show. Listen for conversations on world-building, adaptation, concerns over representation in relation to the show’s depiction of race, gender, and sexuality, and plenty more.

**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**

**As featured on Feedspot’s 25 Best London Education Podcasts**

Fresh from last week’s discussion of Mickey Mouse, Chris and Alex are once again joined by Dr David McGowan (Lecturer in the Contextual and Theoretical Studies of Animation at the University of the Arts London) to map the mythology of the Golden Age of Animation, and in particular how this phase of the medium’s history has been framed in relation to the cartoon’s move from silent to sound technology but also its emergent stability and security as an industrial art form. Listen as they cover animation’s artistic recognition, questions of distribution, and the economic dominance of the major players in Hollywood cartoon production; the precise terms of ‘golden’ as a descriptor for the business of U.S. commercial animation, but also how alternate histories and representations suggest its limits for certain studios and identities; technological innovation, Disney-level aesthetic qualities, and the solidification of ‘full animation’; and the sentimentality afforded to the Golden Age as a period defined as much by dead ends as the heralding of animation’s growing prestige and ambition.

For this new episode of the podcast, Chris and Alex try and do justice to the global stardom of perhaps the most famous animated character of them all - Mickey Mouse. They are joined by Dr David McGowan, who is Lecturer in the Contextual and Theoretical Studies of Animation at the University of the Arts London, as well as author of Animated Personalities: Cartoon Characters and Stardom in American Theatrical Shorts (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2019), to explore Mickey’s enduring celebrity both on and off the animated screen as well as contradictory elements to his stardom that supported his move from cartoon protagonist to animated icon. Listen as the trio discuss Mickey’s shifting star persona and performance style across the three shorts The Karnival Kid (Walt Disney & Ub Iwerks, 1929), Mickey Steps Out (Burt Gillet, 1931), and Clock Cleaners (Ben Sharpsteen, 1937) to map the character in relation to several topics, including cartoon aesthetics and Disney animation’s shift from plasmaticness to hyper-realist registers of representation; romance narratives and the extra-textual coupling of Mickey with Minnie Mouse; the cartoon’s move away from self-reflexivity towards the rounding out of “personality animation”; Mickey’s musicality and modernity, as well as the character’s similarities to Felix the Cat and other animated celebrities of the period; and how Mickey’s links to values of sincerity, intimacy, and humanity perfectly position him as the quintessential animated star.

**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**

**As featured on Feedspot’s 25 Best London Education Podcasts**

Chris and Alex take a look at animation’s historical and troubling relationship to race with this examination of the Censored Eleven, a collection of controversial Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies cartoons produced during the 1930s and 1940s removed from syndication since 1968 for their inclusion of harmful and offensive racist stereotypes. Topics include histories of animating the other, identity, and experience within the medium and legacies of minstrelsy performance; the visibility of Black culture and jazz-based parodies like Bob Clampett’s Coal Black and de Sebben Dwarfs (1943) against more hidden (and no less damaging) iconographies within cartoon representation; and what it means to confront such legacies of racism within the critical study of animation, and if erasing any and all mention of the Censored Eleven pretends that racism in Hollywood did not exist.

**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**

**As featured on Feedspot’s 25 Best London Education Podcasts**