Review: Stella Hockenhull and Frances Pheasant-Kelly (eds.), Tim Burton’s Bodies: Gothic, Animated, Corporeal and Creaturely (2021)
Fig. 1: Stella Hockenhull and Fran Pheasant-Kelly (eds.). Tim Burton's Bodies: Gothic, Animated, Creaturely and Corporeal (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2021).
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.
This collection of essays, edited by Stella Hockenhull and Frances Pheasant-Kelly, examines the different kinds of bodies depicted in Burton’s filmography. The book is structured into four sections: (1) Animated Bodies, (2) Creaturely Bodies, (3) Corporeal Bodies, and (4) Gothic, Monstrous and Peculiar Bodies. Although these four areas are ostensibly distinct, there are understandable crossovers of thematic repetition throughout the book with many of his works being analysed from different perspectives. Corpse Bride (2005), Frankenweenie (1984 and 2012), and Edward Scissorhands (1990) being particularly popular case studies.
Part One – Animated Bodies
As its title suggests, the first section groups its chapters on the basis that they all provide readings of his animated films. In the first chapter Samantha Moore writes about transformation and metamorphosis in Tim Burton’s animated fairy tales. She reveals the complicated relationship that Burton has had with Disney over the years. His early animation education was provided by a Disney-influenced California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) degree in the late 1970s. On graduating, his first job was at Disney where he contributed to the animated feature The Fox and the Hound (1981). Moore argues that Disney’s monocultural approach at this time was based on artistic sophistication, realism in characters and contexts, and believability (p. 18) – which was at odds with Burton’s own interest in metamorphosis, disruption, and outsider characters. Indeed, this mismatch did lead to him leaving Disney early in his career and mostly producing his films elsewhere. However, this departure was not before he made two television specials for Disney including an adaptation of Hansel and Gretel (1983) and Aladdin and His Wonderful Lamp (1986) and a short-live action Frankenweenie (1984), all of which were considered by Disney as too disturbing for children and not in the Disney style (in Bovingdon 2012, Itzkoff 2012). Of course, more recently Burton has directed major films with Disney including Alice in Wonderland (2010), the feature-length animation Frankenweenie (2012), and Dumbo (2019). This trajectory reflects the simultaneous insider/outsider tension in evidence in Burton’s own experience and in the stories and characters he has created.
Fig. 2 - Vincent and his reanimated pet dog, Sparky, in Frankenweenie (2012).
The second chapter provides an exclusive perspective on the creative pipeline of Corpse Bride (2005) from Emily Mantell, a story artist on the film. She discusses the process of becoming a ‘Burton Body’, in that as crew members she and her colleagues embodied ‘the story and the characters both physically and mentally’ (p. 28). Also in Part One, Christopher Holliday writes of the unruliness of Burton’s animation via the case studies of Corpse Bride (2005) and Frankenweenie (2012). This chapter addresses Burton’s own ‘counter identity’ and the ‘performance of nonconformity and dissenting attitudes in Burton’s stop-motion films’ (p. 52). The titular character of Emily in Corpse Bride is analysed in terms of her unruly femininity and Vincent from Frankenweenie in relation to his disruptive zombie-dog, Sparky (see Fig. 2).
Part Two – Creaturely Bodies
Tim Burton has featured many nonhuman animal characters throughout his filmography. Part Two commences with Christopher Parr tackling perceived troubling representations of ethnicity in ‘Burton, Apes and Race: The Creaturely Politics of Tim Burton’s Planet of the Apes’. Parr reads the apes in Burton’s 2001 film being signified as racial others reflecting coding in both the original Planet of the Apes (1968, Dir. Franklin Schaffner) and in some of Burton’s earlier films (see the villain Oogie Boogie in 1993’s The Nightmare Before Christmas). Also in this section, Claire Parkinson returns to the relationship between Burton and Disney in her chapter on his work being ‘too dark for Disney’ with an investigation into his representations of pet death within the horror films he’s made for children. Monstrous masculinity is dealt with by Stella Hockenhull in her discussion on the role of the horse in gothic fiction. Hockenhull uses Monica Mattfield’s intriguing and visually striking concept of men ‘becoming centaur’ (2017) when on horseback and applies it to the male characters in Sleepy Hollow (1999). Specifically, she analyses the ‘monstrous entity’ (p.115) of the headless horseman and the masculinity gained by Johnny Depp’s Ichabod Crane when he masters the spectral steed in the film’s climactic scenes.
Frances Pheasant-Kelly directs us towards ‘anomalous bodies’ in her chapter on Burton’s ‘oddities, misfits and unusual bodies’ (p.119). Quoting Burton: ‘I like people who act like animals or vice versa. Pee-Wee acts like an animation, Beetlejuice, Penguin, the Catwoman…Batman is an animal….it’s just that primal, internal, animal instinct of people’ (p.119) (from Salisbury 2006: 193). Pheasant-Kelly uses Paul Wells’ helpful categories of animated animals to frame her analysis (p.123): pure animal, aspirational human and the hybrid ‘humanimal’ (from Wells, 2009: 52).
Fig. 3 - Still from Big Eyes (2014) showing close-up of Margaret Keane’s (Amy Adams) exaggerated big eyes.
Part Three - Corporeal Bodies
In the third section of the book, the editors have grouped contributions themed around physical, earthbound bodies – a relatively unusual subject for Tim Burton, whose oeuvre so often features the supernatural. Elsa Colombani explores the provocative notion that all of us are cannibals via her discussion of Burton’s satires of capitalism and consumerism in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2005) and Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (2007). Whereas Cath Davies considers the ways in which Burton’s stop-motion animated characters from The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993) and Corpse Bride (2005) gain agency via their corporeal disintegration and costumes. Helena Bassil-Morozow offers a semiotic analysis of broken bodies in several of Burton’s films, including Big Eyes (2014) (Fig. 3). She concludes that hands and eyes are frequently used in close-up to symbolise the danger of touching, relationships being attempted, and revelations about the vulnerability of his outsider characters.
Unusually, Chapter 13 is an examination of the little-known television episode named ‘The Jar’ that Tim Burton directed for Alfred Hitchcock Presents in 1986. Here the chapter’s author, Fernando Gabriel Pagnoni Berns, boldly concludes that the episode’s focus – an ambiguous organ floating in the titular jar – represents Burton’s artistic manifesto for his future career. To elaborate, in the episode there are clear messages about cinema allowing experimentation and deconstruction and a move away from realism and naturalism (another echo of the Burton gothic imagination versus Disney realism dichotomy). Moreover, in ‘The Jar’ Burton presents a shift from ‘high art’ and a clear passion for the different and the marginal. The final chapter in Part Three, is an examination by Peter Piatkowski of Tim Burton’s destruction of Michelle Pfeiffer via her Catwoman performance in Batman Returns (1992). In the film, Pfeiffer’s original character, meek Selina Kyle is brutally murdered by her boss, Max Shreck (Christopher Walken) and returns to ‘life’ as Catwoman. She goes through various states of dishevelment in the process but ultimately emerges as a powerful and alluring zombified-misfit-feline villain. Piatkowski uses Richard Dyer’s theories on audiences’ conceptions of stars (Dyer, 2002), to make the point that expectations for Pfeiffer’s conventional star appearance in Batman Returns were usurped by Burton’s vision of a fractured and grotesque Catwoman, albeit with sexualised connotations.
Part Four - Gothic, Monstrous and Peculiar Bodies
The final part of this collection opens with Michael Lipiner and Thomas J. Cobb’s examination of Burton’s (by now familiar) grotesque outcasts of society which they position in opposition to the homogeneity of North American suburbia. Appropriately the authors use Beetlejuice (1988), Edward Scissorhands (1990), and Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children (2016) as cases in point. This theme is continued by Marie Liénard-Yeterian in Chapter 17 who returns to a study of gothic and grotesque bodies in Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children, with a consideration of the concept of ‘monster’.
Fig. 4: Cast of carnival characters from Big Fish (2003).
One of Burton’s more underrated films, Big Fish (2003) is case studied by José Duarte and Ana Rita Martins in Chapter 16. Here they examine monstrous bodies once more but in the context of the carnivalesque (see Fig. 4), drawing comparisons with the outcast photographs of Diane Arbus. Alex Hackett presents findings on the asexuality of Edward Scissorhands and Willy Wonka in the penultimate chapter. Interestingly, the book concludes with a challenge to the established notion that Burton always celebrates the outsider. Here, Robert Geal compares Edward Scissorhands and Frankenweenie with their source inspiration material of Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel, Frankenstein. Geal concludes that ‘Burton’s rehabilitation of the ostensibly monstrous outsider displaces…Shelley’s original proto-feminist conflation of male power and destructive monstrosity’ (pp.271-272).
Tim Burton’s Bodies will be of interest and use to students and academics in the fields of animation and visual effects, film and media studies, and media production. By shining a light on Burton’s celebrations of animated, creaturely, corporeal, and monstrous gothic bodies this collection also reveals readings of Burton’s tense relationship with Disney, his creative processes, his representations of race and gender, and what it means to be an outsider.
**Article published: January 12, 2024**
References
Bovingdon, Edward. 2012. “Tim Burton: How Disney Fired Me.” Yahoo Movies (October 18, 2012): https://uk.movies.yahoo.com/blogs/movie-editors/tim-burton-disneyfired181740632.html.
Dyer, Richard. 2002. Stars, London: British Film Institute.
Itzkoff, Dave. 2012. “Tim Burton, at Home in His Own Head.” The New York Times (September 19. 2012), https://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/23/movies/tim-burton-at-home-in-his-own-head.html.
Mattfield, Monica. 2017. Becoming Centaur: Eighteenth-Century Masculinity and English Horsemanship, University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press.
Salisbury, Mark, ed. 2006. Burton on Burton. London: Bloomsbury Publishing and Faber & Faber.
Wells, Paul, 2009. The Animated Bestiary: Animals, Cartoons, and Culture. New Brunswick, NJ and London: Rutgers University Press.
Biography
Dr Anna Blagrove is Lecturer in Animation (Context) at Norwich University of the Arts, teaching and assessing Film Theory, Media Roles and Practices, Creative Learning, and Research Reports. She gained her PhD from University of East Anglia in 2020, the topic being teenage film consumption and cinemagoing. Anna is Director of Reel Connections (CIC), a company that uses film, music, and animation to engage community groups. Her research interests are film and media consumption and audiences, Australian and Japanese cinema, and animation. Email: a.blagrove@norwichuni.ac.uk. X/Twitter: @AnnaBlagrove. LinkedIn: Anna Blagrove.