TIM BURTON’S BODIES This anthology was completed during the lockdown of 2020 and so we dedicate it to all those who lost their lives that year TIM BURTON’S BODIES Gothic, Animated, Corporeal and Creaturely Edited by Stella Hockenhull and Frances Pheasant-Kelly Edinburgh University Press is one of the leading university presses in the UK. We publish academic books and journals in our selected subject areas across the humanities and social sciences, combining cutting-edge scholarship with high editorial and production values to produce academic works of lasting importance. For more information visit our website: edinburghuniversitypress.com © editorial matter and organisation Stella Hockenhull and Frances Pheasant-Kelly, 2021 © the chapters their several authors, 2021 Edinburgh University Press Ltd The Tun – Holyrood Road 12 (2f) Jackson’s Entry Edinburgh EH8 8PJ Typeset in 10/12.5 pt Sabon by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire and printed and bound in Great Britain A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 1 4744 5690 6 (hardback) ISBN 978 1 4744 5692 0 (webready PDF) ISBN 978 1 4744 5693 7 (epub) The right of the contributors to be identified as authors of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498). Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders but if any have been inadvertently overlooked, the publisher will be pleased to make the necessary arrangements at the first opportunity. CONTENTS List of Figures viii Notes on Contributors ix Acknowledgements xiv Introduction 1 Stella Hockenhull and Fran Pheasant-Kelly PART ONE ANIMATED BODIES 1. Transformation: Metamorphosis, Animation and Fairy Tale in the Work of Tim Burton 15 Samantha Moore 2. Agreeing to be a ‘Burton Body’: Developing the Corpse Bride Story 27 Emily Mantell 3. Tim Burton’s Unruly Animation 42 Christopher Holliday 4. Corpse Bride: Animation, Animated Corpses and the Gothic 54 Elif Boyacıoğlu CONTENTS PART TWO CREATURELY BODIES 5. Burton, Apes and Race: The Creaturely Politics of Tim Burton’s Planet of the Apes 69 Christopher Parr 6. Dead Pets’ Society: Gothic Animal Bodies in the Films of Tim Burton 81 Rebecca Lloyd 7. Too Dark for Disney: Tim Burton, Children’s Horror and Pet Death 94 Claire Parkinson 8. Monstrous Masculinity: ‘Becoming Centaur’ in Tim Burton’s Sleepy Hollow 105 Stella Hockenhull 9. Anomalous Bodies in Tim Burton’s Bestiary: Reimagining Dumbo 118 Frances Pheasant-Kelly PART THREE CORPOREAL BODIES 10. All of Us Cannibals: Eating Bodies in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street 135 Elsa Colombani 11. ‘I Might Just Split a Seam’: Fabric and Somatic Integrity in the Work of Tim Burton 148 Cath Davies 12. The Semiotics of a Broken Body: Tim Burton’s Use of Synecdoche 161 Helena Bassil-Morozow 13. Art and the Organ Without a Body: ‘The Jar’ as Burton’s Artistic Manifesto 174 Fernando Gabriel Pagnoni Berns 14. ‘Hell Here!’: Tim Burton’s Destruction of Michelle Pfeiffer in Batman Returns 185 Peter Piatkowski vi CONTENTS PART FOUR GOTHIC, MONSTROUS AND PECULIAR BODIES 15. The Grotesque Social Outcast in the Films of Tim Burton 203 Michael Lipiner and Thomas J. Cobb 16. ‘A Giant Man Can’t Have an Ordinary-Sized Life’: On Tim Burton’s Big Fish 219 José Duarte and Ana Rita Martins 17. Tim Burton’s Curious Bodies in Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children: A Contemporary Tale of the Grotesque 233 Marie Liénard-Yeterian 18. Asexuality and Social Anxiety: The Perils of a Peculiar Body 245 Alexandra Jayne Hackett 19. Burton’s Benevolently Monstrous Frankensteins 260 Robert Geal Bibliography 273 Film and Television 294 Index 297 vii FIGURES 2.1 Topsy Turvey Heads designed for portrait gallery in Victor’s house, Emily Mantell for Corpse Bride 28 2.2 Topsy Turvey Heads designed for portrait gallery in Victor’s house, Emily Mantell for Corpse Bride 28 2.3 Concept for Second Hand Store scene, Emily Mantell for Corpse Bride 31 2.4 Final appearance of Second Hand Store in Corpse Bride 31 2.5 Wedding dress for Victoria, Emily Mantell for Corpse Bride 32 2.6 Victorian sewing blanket, Emily Mantell for Corpse Bride 32 2.7–2.10 Possible Effects of Land of the Dead on Land of the Living, Emily Mantell for Corpse Bride 35 2.11 Creating the Film Script 38 2.12–2.19 Corpse Bride transformation, Corpse Bride 39–40 8.1 Daredevil, Sleepy Hollow 112 10.1 Violet, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory 140 10.2 Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street 145 19.1 Frankenweenie 266 19.2 Edward Scissorhands 266 19.3 Frankenweenie 271 19.4 Frankenweenie 272 NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS Helena Bassil-Morozow is a cultural philosopher, media and film scholar and academic author whose many publications include Tim Burton: The Monster and the Crowd (2010), The Trickster in Contemporary Film (2011), The Trickster and the System: Identity and Agency in Contemporary Society (2014), Jungian Film Studies: The Essential Guide (co-authored with Luke Hockley 2016) and Jungian Theory for Storytellers (2018). Fernando Gabriel Pagnoni Berns works as Professor at the Universidad de Buenos Aires (UBA) – Facultad de Filosofía y Letras (Argentina). He teaches courses on international horror film and has authored a book about Spanish horror TV series Historias para no Dormir (Universidad de Cádiz 2020). He has edited a book on the Frankenstein bicentennial and is currently editing books on director James Wan and the Italian giallo film. Elif Boyacıoğlu received her BA in Communication and Design, and MA and PhD in History from Bilkent University, studying death in European medieval societies and related supernatural and folkloric beliefs. She completed a second BA in Animation at the Irish School of Animation, BCFE, Dublin; her ani- mated short The Teacup was screened in over fifty international film festivals, winning seven awards. She is currently an Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Communication at Başkent University. Thomas J. Cobb was awarded his doctorate at the University of Birmingham in April 2018. He is interested in film’s relationship with the ix NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS American political context and Hollywood’s role in allegorising US foreign policy. He works as an academic writing tutor at Coventry University and has worked as a visiting teaching associate at the University of Birmingham, where he taught Discovering North American Literature and Introduction to American and Canadian Studies. His forthcoming monograph is entitled American Cinema and Cultural Diplomacy: The Fragmented Kaleidoscope (2020). Elsa Colombani is an independent scholar. She is the editor of A Critical Companion to Stanley Kubrick (2020). Her thesis focused on the influence of Gothic literature and cinema in Tim Burton’s films. A frequent collaborator of the Critical Companions to Contemporary Directors series, she has recently published a chapter in Tim Burton, a Cinema of Transformations (2018), as well as a study of Netflix films in the French periodical Commentaire (2019). Cath Davies is a Senior Lecturer in Constellation (Critical/Contextual Studies) at Cardiff School of Art and Design, Cardiff Metropolitan University. Her continuing PhD by publication research interrogates the relationship between fabric and corporeality. Articles addressing this include ‘What Lies Beneath: Fabric and Embodiment in Almodóvar’s The Skin I Live In’ (2017) in Fashion, Film, Consumption and ‘Strike a Pose: Fabricating Posthumous Presence in Mannequin Design’, in Journal of Material Culture (2020). José Duarte teaches Cinema at the School of Arts and Humanities (Universidade de Lisboa). He is a researcher at ULICES (University Lisbon Centre for English Studies) and the co-editor of The Global Road Movie: Alternative Journeys around the World (2018). His main research interests include Film History, North American Cinema and Portuguese Cinema. Robert Geal is Lecturer in Film and Television Studies at the University of Wolverhampton. He is the author of Anamorphic Authorship in Canonical Film Adaptation (2019), as well as numerous articles and chapters in jour- nals and edited collections such as Literature/Film Quarterly, The Routledge Companion to Adaptation, New Review of Film and Television Studies, Film International and Adaptation. His second monograph, Ecological Film Theory and Psychoanalysis: Surviving the Environmental Apocalypse in Cinema, will soon be published. Alexandra Jayne Hackett is a filmmaker who has directed numerous short films (credits include Knots Untie and Jay Bird) and is currently working on her first feature-length project, Red Velvet Time Machine. Since gaining an MA in Filmmaking in 2019 at Sheffield Hallam University, she is now pursuing x NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS doctoral study in Film Studies. She has also curated the Black Bird Film festi- val, Wolverhampton (2018–19), showcasing local talent and raising money for a different charity each year. Stella Hockenhull is an Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Wolverhampton, where she was previously a Reader in Film and Television Studies. Her research interests include landscape and painting in British cinema, women film directors, and animals in film. She has published a number of monographs including Aesthetics and Neo-Romanticism in Film: Landscapes in Contemporary British Cinema (2013) and British Women Film Directors in the New Millennium (2017), and numerous articles and chapters in edited collections such as ‘Celebrity Creatures: The “Starification” of the Cinematic Animal’ in Revisiting Star Studies (eds S. Yu and G. Smith 2017). Christopher Holliday teaches Film Studies and Liberal Arts at King’s College London, specialising in Hollywood cinema, animation and contemporary digital media. He is the author of The Computer-Animated Film: Industry, Style and Genre (Edinburgh University Press 2018) and co-editor of the edited collections Fantasy/Animation: Connections Between Media, Mediums and Genres (2018) and Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs: New Perspectives on Production, Reception, Legacy (2021).