Tim Burton's Bodies - by Stella Hockenhull & Fran Pheasant-Kelly (Paperback)

About the Book

This innovative study centres on the body as a centripetal force in Burton's work and considers the array of anomalous, extraordinary and transgressive beings that pervade his canon.

Book Synopsis

Tim Burton is an internationally celebrated director, critically acclaimed for his fantasy horror films and the macabre ghosts, animated corpses and grotesques that inhabit them. This innovative study centres on the body as a centripetal force in Burton's work and considers the array of anomalous, extraordinary and transgressive beings that pervade his canon. It broadens the focus of living forms to include animated, creaturely, corporeal and Gothic bodies, exploring the way that Burton celebrates the body - whether human, animal, animated or anthropomorphised.
In prioritising the somatic aspects of characters, Tim Burton's Bodies spotlights actual physical attributes and behaviour, and considers what meanings these may impart in terms of race, class, gender, sexuality, humanimality and disability.

From the Back Cover

Tim Burton is an internationally celebrated director, critically acclaimed for his fantasy horror films and the macabre ghosts, animated corpses and grotesques that inhabit them. This innovative study centres on the body as a centripetal force in Burton's work and considers the array of anomalous, extraordinary and transgressive beings that pervade his canon. It broadens the focus of living forms to include animated, creaturely, corporeal and Gothic bodies, exploring the way that Burton celebrates the body - whether human, animal, animated or anthropomorphised. In prioritising the somatic aspects of characters, Tim Burton's Bodies spotlights actual physical attributes and behaviour, and considers what meanings these may impart in terms of race, class, gender, sexuality, humanimality and disability. Stella Hockenhull is an Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Wolverhampton. Fran Pheasant-Kelly is Reader in Film and Screen Studies, and Director of the Centre for Film, Media, Discourse and Culture at Wolverhampton University.

Review Quotes

Tim Burton's Bodies provides a distinctive body-centric approach to the analysis of Burton's back-catalogue of animated and live-action films.--Anna Blagrove "Fantasy Animation"

This exemplary cross-disciplinary collection addressing Burton's films through the lens of the somatic, demonstrates considerable empathy for, and sympathy with, his miscellany of outsiders, grotesques, and monsters. Whether animated, animal, or aberrant, Burton's corporeal and material menagerie is explored with insight and originality. This fresh focus on Burton's preoccupation with the 'weird is normal' serves to show how unruly otherness and alternative perspectives shed a penetrating light upon our assumptions about the human condition.--Professor Paul Wells, Loughborough University

About the Author

Dr Stella Hockenhull is Reader in Film and Television Studies at the University of Wolverhampton.

Dr Fran Pheasant-Kelly is Reader in Screen Studies and Director of Centre for Film, Media, Discourse and Culture at the University of Wolverhampton.