Bedknobs and Broomsticks (1971)

Episode 47 bobs along on the bottom of the beautiful briny sea, with Chris and Alex gliding far below the rolling tide and through the bubbly blue and green for this latest episode of the podcast, which this week looks at musical fantasy Bedknobs and Broomsticks (Robert Stevenson, 1971). In addition to the film’s political agenda and 1940s wartime setting, the discussion also takes in both the Hollywood cinema and Disney Feature Animation contexts (including its formal resemblances to Mary Poppins and The Jungle Book); what Bedknobs and Broomsticks’ depiction of an illusory and imaginary London means for the organisation of fantasy against its fictional reality; the integration of musical numbers and questions of utopia; national identity and the representation of Nazism; the variant relationships between animation and sport as equally stylised practices; and how Robert Stevenson’s film gestures to postwar British cinema and the “spiv” cycle. Oh, and there’s a couple of references to Bruce Forsyth too.