Christopher Holliday

Lecturer in Film Studies, Department of Liberal Arts, King's College London
Christopher’s research is largely concerned with the interdependence of style and meaning in contemporary Hollywood cinema, with an emphasis on digital media technologies and forms of computer animation. He is specifically interested in popular filmmaking’s multiple encounters with digital elements and effects. Christopher’s first monograph, The Computer-Animated Film: Industry, Style and Genre (2018) was the first academic work to examine the computer-animated feature film as a global phenomenon of popular cinema. In 2018, Christopher also co-edited the collection Fantasy/Animation: Connections Between Media, Mediums and Genres for Routledge’s AFI Film Readers series, which considers the various historical, theoretical and cultural dimensions of the animated fantasy. His latest book is Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs: New Perspectives on Production, Reception, Legacy (2021) published as part of Bloomsbury’s Animation: Key Films/Filmmakers series. This new edited collection explores the enduring qualities that have marked Snow White's influence and legacy, as well as the film’s central place within the history of global animation. Christopher is currently co-editing an anthology focused on characters and aesthetics in animation as part of the four-volume Encyclopedia of Animation Studies series, to be published with Bloomsbury in 2024. His other new project concerns computer graphics and compositing in relation to the cultural politics of identity. This research investigates the evolving modes and forms of CG characters, cyborgs and posthuman subjects within post-millennial Hollywood film as shifting sites of digital reproduction, labour and convergence. It examines the development of such ‘digital body politics’ within a cross-section of recent U.S. cinema, looking at the exchange between computer technologies and the representation of virtual bodies across different intersections of a range of cultural identity paradigms.