Dear Cinemythologists,
On Thursday, October 8, our unit on Heracles/Hercules comes to an end. Please do the following.
VIEWING
- (Disney’s) Hercules (John Musker & Ron Clements, 1997)
Streaming on Swank Digital Campus. Take notes as you see fit.
And I do mean optional. This is a video version of a lecture/paper I’ve been working on for a while now. Some of you saw a version of it at a Classics banquet last year. Here I’m trying to draw comparisons between animation and the ancient epic convention of ekphrasis. If nothing else, let it illustrate some possibilities for developing a paper topic.
READING
- Blanshard, Alastair J. L. and Kim Shahabudin. 2011. “The Disney Version: Hercules.” Classics on Screen: Ancient Greece and Rome on Film. Chapter 9, 194–215. Bristol Classical Press.
Blanshard and Shahabudin situate Disney’s animated romp against the peplum traditions established decades earlier.
- “The Musical” &”Evolution and Transformation of Genre.” LAM Chapter 3, pp. 100–5.
It’s time to check in again with Looking at Movies, since in today’s screen text we have not only a mythological film set in the ancient world but also a musical, per Disney practice. This reading will help us think about genre conventions as well as ways of transcending genre.
SEQUENCES
- Graubart, Huntley, Raker.
Use the comments feature on this post to recommend a sequence to be reviewed and discussed in class.
Recommendations should contain the following:
- A brief description of the sequence.
- Precise starting and ending times (hh:mm:ss — hh:mm:ss).
- A rationale as to why this sequence is worth our time.
DC
