Footnote #38 tackles the recurrent motif of the storybook that so often begins Disney’s animated features, but which also takes other forms and styles as part of the studio’s sustained dramatisation of storytelling. Listen as Chris and Alex discuss the importance of the prologue within definitions of the Disney formula; animation’s decorative function as a way of actualising and illustrating narrative events; visual developments in the trope and the role of literary legitimisation; and how the recurrent image of the leather-bound manuscript has been subject to contemporary Hollywood animation’s increasingly deconstructive register.

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

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