“The Gospel Truth”: Animated Narrative in Disney’s Hercules (1997)

What can a cartoon tell us about ancient mythmaking? Disney’s Hercules opens with a bang, as the Muses of song and story spring to life from an ancient painted vase and proclaim the glories of Greece’s mightiest hero. Yet their introduction owes much to conventions of storytelling in Greek epic poetry, especially the convention of the ekphrasis, the virtuoso description of an artwork so vivid and clear that it takes on a life of its own. Join Dan Curley in exploring clips from the film, animation theory, and examples from ancient epics — all with an eye toward appreciating this rollicking Disney classic, a version of the Hercules legend unlike any other: colorful, iconoclastic, and fully animated. Dan Curley is Associate Professor and Chair of Classics at Skidmore. His teaching and research interests include Latin poetry, ancient drama, classical mythology, the city of Rome, and the ancient world on screen. He has written articles and essays on classical motifs in modern media, and he is the Vice President of Antiquity in Media Studies (AIMS), an interdisciplinary organization of teacher-scholars dedicated to the discipline of classical reception. This fall, he will offer one of his signature seminars, Classical Myth on Screen.