Contemporary Ukrainian Animation (with Joshua First)

Episode 95 is a special Fantasy/Animation double header, with two recent computer-animated films up for discussion as Chris and Alex look into the stories and symbols of contemporary Ukrainian animation - the country’s first 3D CG film The Dragon Spell (Manuk Depoyan, 2016) based on the stories of Ukrainian writer Anton Siyanika, and The Stolen Princess (Oleg Malamuzh, 2018), a fantasy that adapts the fairytale Ruslan and Ludmila by Russian poet Aleksandr Pushkin. This week’s instalment features as its guest an expert in the politics and aesthetics of modern Russia and the Soviet Union, Dr Joshua First, who is Croft Associate Professor of History and International Studies at the University of Mississippi. Joshua’s work includes the monograph Ukrainian Cinema: Belonging and Identity during the Soviet Thaw (London: I.B. Tauris, 2015) and Sergei Paradjanov: Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors (London: Intellect, 2016), as well as a number of articles on the visual cultures of Eastern Europe. Listen as they discuss Ukrainian history post-Soviet Union and The Revolution of Dignity; how such historical moments open up the Ukraine’s reclamation of pan-European/Russian mythologies; notions of recovery, the politics of recognition, and how stories can impose the image of a nation; the interdisciplinary status and activist potential of ‘useful’ animation; the ‘Frozenification’ of the computer-animated fairytale; and how both The Dragon Spell and The Stolen Princess offer fantasy worlds that reflexively provide folkloric understandings of what Ukrainian animation might be. **Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo** **This episode was produced and edited by Leon Waldo**