Tim Burton’s Bodies provides a distinctive body-centric approach to the analysis of Burton’s back-catalogue of animated and live-action films (see Fig. 1 for book cover). Tim Burton is an internationally celebrated filmmaker, animator and artist who has worked in the industry since the 1980s. His work is commercially and critically acclaimed and is mostly associated with the fantasy horror sub-genre, the macabre and spectral, animated corpses and grotesque outsider protagonists.
Read MoreIt seems that even film fans are becoming increasingly aware of the huge significance China is going to play in the next few decades of popular culture. In a global media landscape otherwise dominated by the United States, the huge significance of both the Chinese box office and the Chinese government’s cultural politics is shaping the fortunes of the globalised media industry.
Read MoreIn Animating Truth: Documentary and Visual Culture in the 21st Century, Nea Ehrlich discusses a growing body of works broadly called animated documentaries. For the purposes of this open-access monograph, Ehrlich employs Sheila Sofian’s definition of the form as “any animated film that deals with non-fiction material” (36), expands it beyond the cinematic space and considers the use of animation outside of the theatrical setting.
Read MoreThe overall argument of Matthew Oliver’s Magic Words, Magic Worlds (2022) is that the style of epic fantasy shapes readers’ experiences in what he broadly calls “political ways” (26). Politics here includes the identity positions that authors, readers and characters can take, and empathy is discussed as one of the prime mechanisms facilitating such political involvement.
Read MoreSystematic genre criticism has gone out of fashion and Sotiris Petridis’s Anatomy of the Slasher Film: A Theoretical Analysis (2019) is an attempt to respond to this pressing need in genre studies. Anatomy of the Slasher Film (Fig. 1) consists of an introduction, four chapters, a conclusion, two appendices (“Films Referenced” and “Semantic Elements”), endnotes, a filmography, a bibliography, and an index.
Read MoreNoel Brown provides an engaging and well-researched account of contemporary Hollywood feature animation, here defined as from the 1990s onwards. Noting the recent significance of animation to both the Hollywood studios, their parent conglomerates, and popular culture more broadly, he aims to outline the “form and poetics of the mainstream animated feature” (Brown 2020, 2), with chapters devoted to their narrative and thematic focus on family and friendship, aesthetic shifts, and changes around their representations of identity.
Read MoreWe live in haunted times. Haunted by the memories of a pre-pandemic existence, we continue to persevere through variant viral outbreaks. Haunted by the two-dimensional digital avatars cast on our devices (at least for those of us fortunate enough to have this luxury), we are increasingly alienated from our three-dimensional biological selves.
Read MoreIn Fairy Tales of London, Hadas Elber-Aviram traces the way in which eight British authors combine London and the fantastic in various stories. Elver-Aviram argues that the fictions of Charles Dickens, H. G. Wells, George Orwell, Mervyn Peake, Michael Moorcock, M. John Harrison, Neil Gaiman, and China Miéville form a coherent, socially engaged, literary tradition that is intimately connected to modern urbanity.
Read MoreGothic Film: An Edinburgh Companion provides a wide variety of perspectives based on differing examples of the Gothic within the film with analyses categorised by genre, time-period, and theoretical approach
Read MoreThe very title of this new collection may leave experienced readers raising eyebrows. Arthuriana, after all, is a complex tradition with a long history of adaptation and remediation, so it might be difficult to imagine that a single book could cover two entire centuries of these practices and the texts they produce.
Read MoreNineteen Eighty-Four (1949) as a novel has taken on a life divorced from its creator. In political parlance, the book—or terms from it—have been used to herald apocalyptic prophecies, no matter the political affiliation. For example, recently in the United States, Senator Josh Hawley, R-MO, used the term “Orwellian” to describe a publishing house’s cancellation of a book contract.
Read MoreDon Corrigan’s light-hearted Nuts About Squirrels: The Rodents that Conquered Popular Culture (McFarland, 2019) makes the case for a squirrel as the dominant rodent of American popular culture.
Read MoreSince its first full-length episode, “Simpsons Roasting on an Open Fire” (1989) (Fig. 1), The Simpsons (1989-) has been nominated for a plethora of awards. It is the first animated series to win an esteemed Peabody Award (1997), which was created to honour powerful, enlightening, and invigorating stories in media, and it has won 34 Emmy Awards across all areas of its production, which is an impressive result for an animated TV series.
Read MoreEver since Bram Stoker published Dracula in 1897, his vision of the vampire has dominated the popular imagination as the representation of absolute horror. Vampire lore had existed for millennia across numerous cultures, but Stoker’s iteration of the monster as an almost undefeatable entity that represents a cultural other and threatens to subvert modern societal norms has resonated throughout the twentieth and twentieth-first centuries, particularly on film.
Read MoreNeil Gaiman should be a familiar name to aficionados of speculative fiction. His oeuvre is characterised by its variety of written forms and its tendency to draw on anything from whispered urban legends to ancient religious texts, and from Victorian high literature to 1980s pulp fantasy.
Read MoreMaria Sachiko Cecire’s Re-Enchanted: The Rise of Children’s Fantasy Literature in the Twentieth Century (2019) is an expertly crafted study. This is a book about children’s literature in the twentieth-century, how it came to be shaped, and why medieval elements are so prevalent.
Read MoreFantasy storytelling reached a new level of cultural visibility and mainstream popularity with the immense success of Game of Thrones (2011-19). As Game of Thrones rose to prominence, it inspired The Simpsons creator Matt Groening to develop a new animated series, his first major new series since Futurama (1999-2013).
Read MoreIt seems fair to suggest that, right now, there is just a bit of cultural interest in the figure of the superhero. Thanks to the efforts of DC and the MCU in particular, the superhero film has arisen out of its somewhat middling status amongst Hollywood production schedules throughout the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s to reach a status comparable only to that once enjoyed by the classical western or musical.
Read MoreJeff McLaughlin's Graphic Novels as Philosophy collects 10 essays that consider how well known graphic novels can be conceptualised through (and potentially expand) philosophy (Fig. 1). The collection covers, among others, considerations of social contract theory, carnival and the idea of queering epistemology. In addition, the reader is invited to consider how the format and structure of the graphic novel could enhance our ability to ‘do’ philosophical work.
Read MoreThe comic book adaptation has become one of the most prominent genres in recent cinema. In response, academic studies on comic books, comic book adaptations, superheroes and their ilk, have increased in number with many scholars bringing a variety of critical approaches to this popular type of production. Drew Morton’s Panel to the Screen: Style, American Film, and Comic Books During the Blockbuster Era (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2016) focuses on an aesthetic used throughout cinematic adaptations of comic book properties, that of “remediation,” defined by Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin as “the representation of one medium in and by another” (6).
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