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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
Acknowledgementsxiv

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
Story27
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 Apes69
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 Hollow105
Stella Hockenhull
9. Anomalous Bodies in Tim Burton’s Bestiary: Reimagining Dumbo118
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 Street135
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
Manifesto174
Fernando Gabriel Pagnoni Berns
14. ‘Hell Here!’: Tim Burton’s Destruction of Michelle Pfeiffer in
Batman Returns185
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 Fish219
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

Bibliography273
Film and Television 294
Index297

vii
 FIGURES

2.1 Topsy Turvey Heads designed for portrait gallery in Victor’s

house, Emily Mantell for Corpse Bride28
2.2 Topsy Turvey Heads designed for portrait gallery in Victor’s
house, Emily Mantell for Corpse Bride28
2.3 Concept for Second Hand Store scene, Emily Mantell for
Corpse Bride31
2.4 Final appearance of Second Hand Store in Corpse Bride31
2.5 Wedding dress for Victoria, Emily Mantell for Corpse Bride32
2.6 Victorian sewing blanket, Emily Mantell for Corpse Bride32
2.7–2.10 Possible Effects of Land of the Dead on Land of the Living,
Emily Mantell for Corpse Bride35
2.11 Creating the Film Script 38
2.12–2.19 Corpse Bride transformation, Corpse Bride39–40
8.1 Daredevil, Sleepy Hollow112
10.1 Violet, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory140
10.2 Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street145
19.1 Frankenweenie266
19.2 Edward Scissorhands266
19.3 Frankenweenie271
19.4 Frankenweenie272
 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). He is also the curator and creator of
the website/blog/podcast fantasy-animation.org.

Marie Liénard-Yeterian is Professor of American Literature and Cinema at

University Côte d’Azur. Her fields of research are Southern Literature, American
Theatre and the American South in film. She has published numerous articles,
monographs and edited collections, including Faulkner et le cinéma (2010), A
Streetcar Named Desire: From Pen to Prop, Play and Film (2012), Nouvelles
du Sud: Hearing Voices, Reading Stories (2012) and Le Sud au cinéma (2009),
and is currently working on a book on the grotesque on screen.

Michael Lipiner is currently pursuing his doctorate degree in film studies at

Bangor University in Wales. A native New Yorker, he resides in Israel where he
is the programme adviser for the Diplomacy and International Communication
in English program at Leo Baeck Education Center in Haifa. He also created
the ongoing film studies programme at Bayside High School in conjunction
with St John’s University in New York City where seniors receive college
credit. He is interested in American cinema and its cultural implications for
which he teaches, writes about and gives lectures. He has published a play and
articles in Quarterly Review of Film and Video, The International Journal of
Comic Art and E-Learning and Digital Media.

xi
notes on contributors

Rebecca Lloyd is an independent researcher, with publications on Gothic envi-

ronments and creatures including Gothic Animals: Uncanny Otherness and the
Animal With-Out (eds Heholt and Edmundson 2020); Haunted Landscapes:
Super-Nature and the Environment (eds Heholt and Downing 2016), and is
co-author on ‘Anne Rice’ for The Encyclopedia of the Gothic (2013). She is
also writing on historical crime fiction.

Emily Mantell is an RCA Animation graduate. Her films have travelled the
world on the festival circuit. Gifted won the best student film in the British
Animation Awards in 2004. After working on Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride,
she won a Creative Pioneer Award from NESTA for Prude, a business she ran
for two years. Emily has also worked on BAFTA award-winning films and is
currently Animation Course Leader at the University of Wolverhampton.

Ana Rita Martins is an English lecturer in the Department of English Studies at

the School of Arts and Humanities (Universidade de Lisboa) and a researcher
at the ULICES (University of Lisbon Centre for English Studies). Her main
research interests include monsters and monstrosity, medieval romance, medi-
evalism, fantasy and science fiction.

Samantha Moore is a UK-based, international award-winning animation direc-

tor and is coordinator for the Masters’ courses in Media at Manchester School
of Art, and Associate Professor in Animation at University College Volda
(Norway). She has made work on diverse subjects, from competitive sweet
pea growing to cutting-edge microbiology, and her own experience of having
twins. Her most recent film, Bloomers (2019), has won several international
awards, including Best British Film at the London International Animation
Festival (2019), and was nominated for a British Animation Award for Best
Short Film (2020).

Claire Parkinson is Professor of Film, Television and Digital Media and

Co-director of the Centre for Human Animal Studies at Edge Hill University.
Her publications include the books Animals, Anthropomorphism and
Mediated Encounters (2019), Popular Media and Animals (2011), Memento
(2010), Routledge Companion to Cinema and Politics (2016), American
Independent Cinema (2012) and Beyond Human (2012). She is currently
Principal Investigator on two Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded
projects that explore multi-species storytelling.

Christopher Parr is a PhD candidate at the University of Wolverhampton. He

is currently researching antihuman attitudes in twenty-first-century science-
fiction cinema and has presented papers at various national and international

xii
 notes on contributors

conferences on Planet of the Apes, prestige horror and the films of actor Doug
Jones.

Frances Pheasant-Kelly is Reader in Screen Studies and Director of the Centre

for Film, Media, Discourse and Culture at the University of Wolverhampton.
She has written over sixty-five publications, including Abject Spaces in
American Cinema (2013) and Fantasy Film Post 9/11 (2013), and is the co-
editor of Spaces of the Cinematic Home: Beyond the Screen Door (2015). She
is currently working on several monographs, including The Bodily Turn in
Film and Television and A History of HIV/AIDS in Film, Television and the
Media.

Peter Piatkowski is a London-based writer specialising in film, pop culture,

feminist and queer studies, music, literature and travel. He was raised in
Chicago, where he attended school and ultimately earned his MA in English
Literature from DePaul University and his MFA in Creative Writing, Nonfiction
from Roosevelt University. He taught English writing and reading with the
City Colleges of Chicago and has had work published in numerous journals,
anthologies and magazines.

xiii
 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This collection arose from a conference on Tim Burton’s Bodies, organised

by the Centre for Film, Media, Discourse and Culture at the University
of Wolverhampton in 2018, and held at Light House Media Centre,
Wolverhampton. The editors would like to thank the University of
Wolverhampton for their generous support of the event and the subsequent
research time that has enabled this publication. We are more than grateful to
Kelly Jeffs, Jas Kapur and all other staff at the Light House who worked so
hard to make the conference successful. Thanks also to staff at the University,
especially Amrit Chodda, Donna Hughes, Nicky Bhatti and Jill Morgan, Helen
Page and Luke Bristow. Special thanks to postgraduate students Tim Gough,
Chloe Homewood, Paul Jonze, Safire Jones and Dan Whorton, who all made
the conference run so smoothly. Finally, and not least, many thanks to the staff
at Edinburgh University Press, especially Gillian Leslie and Richard Strachan,
for bearing with us during lockdown.

xiv
 INTRODUCTION

Stella Hockenhull and Fran Pheasant-Kelly

The theme for Tim Burton’s Bodies derives from Tim Burton’s international
reputation and critical acclaim for fantasy horror films that are inhabited by
ghosts, animated corpses, grotesque and horrible bodies or otherwise ‘different’
beings. It also emerges from his acknowledged proclivity for character-over-
narrative-driven films. The aim here is to reframe analyses of Burton’s work
and provide insights into his somatic sensibilities to filmmaking by employing
the ‘body’ as a central organising theme. At the same time, the book employs
rigorous theoretical underpinning and a range of methodologies from a variety
of disciplines as relevant to each aspect of character/film or group of films,
simultaneously examining Burton’s mainstream works as well as some lesser-
known productions. While the overall approach involves textual readings, this
collection of international scholarship on the theme of bodies has the added
insight and experience of a crew member involved with Corpse Bride (2005), as
well as animal studies’ perspectives on the representation of creaturely beings.
Bodies are central to Burton’s films in ways that exceed their obvious neces-
sity to narrative. In considering the array of anomalous, extraordinary and
transgressive beings that pervade his canon, this study broadens the focus of
living forms to include animated, creaturely, corporeal and Gothic bodies.
Fundamentally, Burton celebrates the body, whether human, animal, animated
or anthropomorphised, and more particularly if it is in some way unusual
or off-kilter. Therefore, as well as often subordinating narrative to distinc-
tive visual design, for which he is noted, he also prioritises the physicality
of characters. His productions, either as director or producer, span short

1
stella hockenhull and fran pheasant-kelly

film and music video to theatrical releases, his earliest work including several
short films, ranging from The Island of Dr Agor (1971), Vincent (1982) and
Frankenweenie (1984) to the later Stainboy (2000). Burton has also been
involved in television, directing Alfred Hitchcock Presents: The Jar (season
1, episode 19) (1986) and Faerie Tale Theatre: Aladdin and his Wonderful
Lamp (season 5, episode 1) (1986), as well as several commercials, including
a French chewing gum advert (1998) and two for Timex-1-Control watches
(2000). Aside from music videos for The Killers (directed in 2006 and 2012),
Burton is best known for his cinematic directorial output, with nineteen major
productions to date (although, despite his role as producer for The Nightmare
Before Christmas (Selick 1993), this film is usually attributed to him). The
first of these was Pee-wee’s Big Adventure (1985) and thereafter followed a
series of commercially successful and critically acclaimed films, his most recent
enterprises including Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children (2016) and
Dumbo (2019). He has achieved Academy Award nominations for Corpse
Bride and Frankenweenie (2012) and won numerous other awards as well as
attaining worldwide box office figures totalling $4.447 billion approximately
to date. The most lucrative was Alice in Wonderland (2010), which earned
over a billion dollars worldwide.1

The Body in Film

Scientific Bodies
In contextualising Burton’s filmic affinity for physical form there follows an
overview of key academic studies and trends as they relate to the body in
cinema and visual culture, although it is beyond the scope of this volume to
consider all previous discourse published in this field. Burton’s fixation with
bodily-ness, discernible in his earliest films, corresponds to a broader Western
cultural obsession with the nuances of physicality that has emerged in the
past fifty years, hereafter referred to as ‘the bodily turn’. Although such a
phenomenon is already noted by other scholars (Brophy 1986; Boss 1986;
Cooter 2010), there is limited discussion of its extent or its possible causes.
Nonetheless, Bryan Turner does identify a more long-standing ‘somatic society’
in social theory (1996: 6) and Mariam Fraser and Monica Greco suggest that
the 1980s is a threshold for thinking about the body (2005: 3). Arguably, this
bodily turn results from the intersection of various medical, socio-cultural and
political factors that coincided in the early 1970s. Even before this revived
focus on the corporeal being, however, the body has always been a source
of fascination and scrutiny and, prior to the invention of cinema, audiences
gathered for public displays of execution and anatomy (Stephens 2011). The
development of cinema facilitated this affinity for the corporeal, with the

2
 introduction

socio-cultural, technological and political zeitgeist at any given moment dictat-

ing how the body is contemporaneously represented. Initially, it was at the
centre of documentaries and a ‘cinema of attractions’, which was characterised
by novelty and shock that usually involved the spectacle of human figures,
and often afforded the same morbid pre-cinema aspects of gazing at the dead
and the executed. In this vein, Marina Dahlquist, Doron Gaili, Jan Olsson and
Valentine Robert’s anthology Corporeality in Early Cinema (2018), which
traces the ‘Body Under the Scalpel’ through to ‘Death by a Thousand Cuts’,
documents early photographic and cinematic records of ‘mental patients’,
nudity, indigenous cultures, dance and sports performers and strongmen, as
well as images of death and dying. The late nineteenth century also witnessed
the recording of human and animal motion in the sequential photography of
Eadweard Muybridge and Jules Etienne Marey, their imagery effectively func-
tioning as a precursor to early cinema, with the subject of the human form in
motion captured by Jonathan Auerbach (2007) in Body Shots: Early Cinema’s
Incarnations. Lisa Cartwright (1995) too reports on early cinema’s recording
of animals, albeit from a scientific perspective that focuses on physiological
experimentation rather than motion. In charting medicine’s visual culture,
she goes on to consider the human body as object of the medical gaze. In a
related way, Tim Boon (2008) analyses public health and scientific documen-
taries, with examples including the microscopic body, natural history subjects,
children’s bodies in vaccination promotion campaigns and malnourished
bodies in the post-Depression era. Other scientific approaches to physicality
in film are wide-ranging and include Anneka Smelik’s (2010) collection which
centres on more contemporary interfaces between science and visual culture.
For instance, an essay by Michel van Dartel examines ‘haptic visuality’ in its
scientific form whereby vision is substituted with vibration on the skin (2010:
126). Also reflecting recent scientific development with regard to onscreen
bodies, Jackie Stacey examines the ‘cinematic life of the gene’ (2010) whereby
she considers the effect of genetic engineering and cloning on filmic imagery.
Relatedly, while not focusing solely on film, Susan Squier (2004) explores the
interactions, influences and overlaps between culture and science.

Circuses, Freakshows and Performing Bodies

Especially relevant to Burton’s filmmaking and connected to the aforemen-
tioned cinema of attractions are those films that centre on bodily deformity
and aberration, such as Tod Browning’s Freaks (1932) and David Lynch’s
The Elephant Man (1980). Scholarship on the extraordinary and anomalous
body, which has increased in recent decades partly owing to the bodily turn,
includes work by Rosemarie Garland Thomson (1996; 1997), Rachel Adams
(2001) and Angela Smith (2011), and associated analysis of circus bodies (Tait

3
stella hockenhull and fran pheasant-kelly

2005; Tait and Lavers 2016). Correspondingly, Adrienne McLean’s (2008)

study of ballet, the body and narrative cinema traces the history of dance from
the early studio days through to the post-studio era. It considers aspects such
as the embodiment of the eponymous red shoes in Michael Powell and Emeric
Pressburger’s The Red Shoes (1948) as an aspect of compulsive behaviour
(McLean 2008: 152) and their association with promotional material involv-
ing ‘long legs’ (McLean 2008: 166), as well as investigating aspects of gender
and sexuality concomitant with ballet.
Animal bodies, particularly those belonging to circuses, are also a noticeable
feature of Burton’s films and have recently come to the fore in scholarship
generally, with significant works including Primate Visions (Haraway 1990),
Simians, Cyborgs, and Women (Haraway 1991), The Selfish Gene (Dawkins
2006), Ethics and Animals (Gruen 2011) and Animal Liberation (Singer 2015).
Those works addressing a specific film and visual cultural context comprise
Popular Media and Animals (2011), Beyond Human (2012) and Animals,
Anthropomorphism and Mediated Encounters (2019) authored by Claire
Parkinson (formerly Molloy), a contributor to this collection. Other recent
studies of animals in visual culture include Picturing the Beast (Baker 2001),
The Animated Bestiary (Wells 2009), Creaturely Poetics (Pick 2011), Animal
Life: The Moving Image (Lawrence and McMahon 2015), Screening the
Nonhuman (George and Schatz 2016) and Deleuze and the Animal (Gardner
and MacCormack 2017).

Bodies of War
Of less importance to a consideration of bodies in Burton’s outputs are those
works countenancing the representation of the body at war. While Burton does
include abject visuals, and a theme of death underpins many of his films, these
invariably involve surreal or fantastic circumstance and are removed from real
images of the wartime body. In the latter respect, Susan Sontag (2003) debates
the response to images of horror arising from news footage of warfare and
its aftermath, while there is extensive study of documentary imagery arising
from the Holocaust, including works by Oren Stier (2015) and Sander Gilman
(2003). Karl Schoonover (2012) examines the spatial relations involved in
Italian Neorealism between the imperilled body of the sufferer and the specta-
tor and ‘is focused on internationalising pity’s spatial order [whereby] for
neorealism, corporealism is a graphic force capable of opening Italy to the
global spectator’ (2012: xiv–xv). Related to Italian film, Angela Dalle Vacche
considers how Italian culture is translated to the screen body whereby she
explores the connections between Italian Renaissance painting and cinema
in terms of the ‘human figure, the theatricality of space, and the allegorical
dimension of the visual narrative’ (2014: 4).

4
 introduction

Bodies of Gender, Race and Stardom

In contrast to bodies of war, the star bodies of classic Hollywood are discussed
by Richard Dyer in his book, Heavenly Bodies (2004), whereby he details
how the screen image of major Hollywood stars was constructed. During the
post-war period and following the demise of the Hollywood studio system,
a relaxation of censorship led to increasingly sexualised representations of
the human body and, subsequently, the emergence of the queer body, as
discussed by Harry Benshoff (1997) and Michele Aaron (2004). At the same
time, the civil rights movement and growth of feminism, which began to
challenge the stereotyped and prescriptive roles of women and blacks in film,
resulted in studies of the racial and/or gendered body by authors including
Lola Young (1996), Chris Holmlund (2002), bell hooks (2008) and Frantz
Fanon (2020). Likewise, Yvonne Tasker focuses on spectacular gendered
bodies (1993) and Barbara Creed is known for her thesis of the monstrous
feminine (1993). Concurrently, as a reflection of the post-Vietnam War era
and the distinct militaristic position projected by Ronald Reagan, films such
as Rambo: First Blood (Kotcheff 1982) and Die Hard (McTiernan 1988)
articulated masculinity through an emphasis on the ‘hard body’ (Jeffords
1993). More recently, and foregrounding the films of independent women
directors, Kate Ince (2017) considers female subjectivities through The Body
and the Screen.

Affective Bodies and Subjectivity

While scholarship pertaining to the body usually pivots around textual repre-
sentation, a number of academic works instead consider the body of the spec-
tator in terms of affective modes. For instance, Luke Hockley utilises aspects
of Jungian psychotherapy to consider how ‘the body of the spectator and
the cinema screen are interrelated sites of meaning’ (2014: 1), Julian Hanich
(2012) elaborates on abjection and disgust as aesthetic strategies for fear and
audience affect, and Xavier Aldana Reyes analyses the affective-corporeal
dimensions of horror (2016). In compiling various filmmakers’ contributions
to bodily representation, Steven Shaviro likewise examines the reactions of the
spectator and ‘foregrounds visceral, affective responses to film’ (1993: viii),
while Alanna Thain explores a similar relationship through examples such as
the Hollywood films of David Lynch and Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958).
In terms of other less tangible aspects of the body, Davina Quinlivan examines
the place of breath in cinema (2014), Laura Marks (2000) proposes a ‘haptic
visuality’ whereby certain images enable the spectator to experience cinema as
a physical embodiment of culture, and Kaja Silverman (1988) surveys the voice
in The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and Cinema.

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stella hockenhull and fran pheasant-kelly

Abject Bodies and the Posthuman

During the late twentieth century, genres became saturated with explicit body
imagery, especially the abject interior body. More recently, the onscreen body
has become even more graphic with, for example, the tortured form recorded
on film by military police at Abu Ghraib (Danner 2004), terrorist executions
accessible on the Internet and the first public autopsy for 170 years, performed
by anatomist Gunther von Hagens (2002), available on television. Relevant
to the filming of terrorist detainee abuse at Abu Ghraib and other detainee
camps, Judith Butler (2009) discusses the tortured body while Steve Allen
(2013) considers sadomasochism, body modification and torture in fictional
productions such as 8mm (Schumacher 1999) and Boxing Helena (Lynch
1993). While a sense of the violated physical body is increasingly incidental
to many contemporary mainstream films and television dramas (for example,
the post-millennial cycle of James Bond films) for reasons related to vulnerable
post-9/11 masculinities, it has, since the 1970s, become a key aesthetic in
numerous artworks as well as genres such as horror, science fiction, reality
television, medical drama, medical documentary, fantasy and forensic crime
drama. A consideration of the body therefore dominates associated texts,
such as Body Trauma TV (Jacobs 2003), Cultural Sutures: Medicine and
Media (Friedman 2004) and Spectatorship, Embodiment and Physicality in the
Contemporary Mutilation Film (Wilson 2015). Aside from a relaxation in cen-
sorship, the trend towards displays of the interior body is arguably informed
by medical developments since the 1970s, including MRI, CT and keyhole
surgery, while an inclination towards what Mark Seltzer (1997) describes as
a ‘wound culture’ – the public fascination with opened and torn bodies – has
further engendered tropes of viscerality.
With the advent of motion-capture technology and CGI, so too is the post-
human-, post-anthropocentric- and cyborg-body increasingly foregrounded
in films of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, with produc-
tions ranging from The Terminator (Cameron 1984) to Avatar (Cameron
2009); accordingly, this turn to the posthuman body is reflected in a range of
edited collections and monographs addressing the interfaces between the body
and technology, and features work by Judith Halberstam and Ira Livingston
(1995), N. Katherine Hailes (1999), David Bell and Barbara Kennedy (2000),
Neil Badmington (2000), Elaine Graham (2002) and Rosi Braidotti (2013).
Relatedly, Niall Richardson (2016) examines transgressive bodies in film and
popular culture in a study that extends across hyper-muscular, fat, trans-sexed
and disabled bodies, and Xavier Aldana Reyes (2014) similarly analyses cor-
poreal transgression in Gothic horror film and literature. Robert Furze (2015)
too explores the visceral screen through the films of David Cronenberg and
John Cassavetes, while Michele Aaron (1999) engages with the ‘dangerous

6
 introduction

pleasures’ of the body through an examination of productions ranging from

Cronenberg’s Dead Ringers (1988) to William Friedkin’s The Exorcist (1973).

The Films of Tim Burton

It is at the confluence of this bodily turn with discourses of disability, the
freakshow and circus, corporeality and transgression, as well as the abject,
Gothic and posthuman, that Burton’s work is located. These modes intersect
with a broad diegetic chronology that extends back to 1799 in Sleepy Hollow
(1999) and forward to the year 2029 in Planet of the Apes (2001). Indeed,
Burton’s films are often grounded in the abject, corporeal body, as exemplified
by Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (2007), Corpse Bride and
Sleepy Hollow. More specifically, imagery directly involves death, dissection,
decay and reanimation, as evidenced in Sleepy Hollow, Frankenweenie and
Corpse Bride. If Burton particularly embraces chimeric, transitional, ambigu-
ous and circus bodies as in Big Fish (2003), Dumbo and Edward Scissorhands
(1990), spectral bodies are found in Beetlejuice (1988), transgressed bodies
in Mars Attacks! (1996) and animal bodies across a range of films including
Planet of the Apes, Frankenweenie, Mars Attacks! and Sleepy Hollow.
Certain of these somatic qualities are identified in other analyses of his
work, but they tend to feature peripherally rather than centrally. Instead,
scholarly studies either direct their attention to theoretical aesthetic framings,
such as the uncanny, the grotesque and the abject, or otherwise take a thematic
approach that pivots around subjects such as space, film soundtrack, German
expressionist and Gothic influences or, at other times, the monstrous body.
Such works include Johnson Cheu’s edited collection, Tim Burton: Essays on
the Films (2016), which comprises three sections, the first of which, ‘Outsider
Characters and Other Oddities’, has some connection to the theme of bodies.
Indeed, one chapter focuses on ‘The Typical and Atypical body in Charlie
and the Chocolate Factory’ and another examines ‘Corporeal Mediation
and Visibility in Sleepy Hollow’. However, neither chapter overlaps with the
theoretical approaches adopted in Tim Burton’s Bodies. Subsequent sections
of Cheu’s anthology concentrate on the nature of adaptations, technology,
artistry and stardom which are only indirectly related to bodies. Like Cheu’s
anthology, The Works of Tim Burton: Margins to Mainstream (2013), edited
by Jeffrey Weinstock, is also divided into three sections. These examine
aesthetics, influences and contexts and thematics, and comprise aspects such
as the spaces of Burton’s films, the director’s trash cinema roots and a
consideration of Danny Elfman’s music and auteurist fandom. While none
of the essays centre on bodies, Carol Siegel’s chapter has some connection
to Alex Hackett’s examination of sexuality in Edward Scissorhands – while
Hackett acknowledges Siegel’s argument, her claim differs in that Hackett

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stella hockenhull and fran pheasant-kelly

sees Scissorhands as an asexual being rather than one involved in sado­

masochistic rituals.
More recently, A Critical Companion to Tim Burton (2017), edited by Adam
Barkman and Antonio Sanna, comprises three sections based on the spaces in
which Burton’s films are set and entail: ‘Constructing Worlds’, ‘Fairy Worlds
and Nightmares’ and ‘Identity and the World’. In considering a broad range of
aspects associated with these three areas, the essays extend from the fabrication
of fantasy spaces of the films and the associated mise-en-scène and narrative
construction through to how identity might be interpreted. While certain chap-
ters explore characterisation, the subject of the body is not explicitly addressed,
with the collection generally preoccupied with spaces and settings.
Conversely, Jennifer McMahon’s edited collection (2014), The Philosophy
of Tim Burton, debates the philosophical significance of Burton’s productions
and is organised around three key areas: identity, authority and art. The first
part considers identity and the nature of the self; the second looks at the
domain of the social and how Burton’s films comment on authority; the final
part focuses on aesthetics. Overall, the book differs fundamentally to the
somatic focus of Tim Burton’s Bodies.
Aside from these edited collections and a number of fan-based guides, there
are several scholarly monographs devoted to Burton. These include Alison
McMahan’s The Films of Tim Burton: Animating Live Action in Contemporary
Hollywood, which considers the industry aspects of Burton’s films, spanning
animation, CGI, marketing, adaptation and Elfman’s music. Her primary
argument is that Burton’s films are what she terms ‘pataphysical’ and possess
certain characteristics: they make fun of established systems of knowledge
and rituals, display an alternative narrative logic, use special effects that are
‘visible’ as opposed to invisible, and have thin plots and characters that are
not rounded because the narrative depends more on intertextual, nondiegetic
aspects (McMahan 2005: 3). McMahan’s monograph therefore is focused and
narrow and does not discuss bodies in any direct form.
In a series of interviews with Burton, Mark Salisbury (2006) discusses all his
films up to that point, devoting a chapter to each, with the discussions extend-
ing to most aspects of the filmmaking process. Since this edition, however,
Burton has directed many more films, including Sweeney Todd: The Demon
Barber of Fleet Street, Alice in Wonderland (2010), Dark Shadows (2012),
Frankenweenie (2012), Big Eyes (2014), Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar
Children (2016) and Dumbo (2019).
Helena Bassil-Morozow too has made a significant contribution to scholar-
ship in her monograph on Burton, titled Tim Burton: The Monster and the
Crowd (2010). Bassil-Morozow, one of the contributors to this collection,
employs Jungian and post-Jungian psychology to explore the isolation of
Burton’s protagonists. The book’s six chapters consider the various guises

8
 introduction

of Burton’s protagonists, including the child, monster, superhero, genius and

maniac as well as monstrous society, and while her study is character-based,
it has a psychological rather than a somatic focus. I​n contrast, Masters of the
Grotesque: The Cinema of Tim Burton, Terry Gilliam, the Cohen Brothers
and David Lynch (2012), authored by Schuy Weishaar, provides limited cover-
age of Burton’s outputs owing to its inclusion of several other directors in the
book. In a chapter titled ‘Tim Burton’s Two Worlds’, Weishaar discusses the
various manifestations of the grotesque, and while alluding to the corporeal
body, the chapter does not wholly engage with physicality.

Tim Burton’s Bodies

Tim Burton’s Bodies thus contributes to a gap in the literature in relation to a
coherent consideration of bodies as a centripetal force in Burton’s work. What
this book does differently is to spotlight actual physical attributes and figure
behaviour of characters and the meanings that these may impart in terms of
race, class, gender, sexuality, humanimality and disability. Its distinctiveness
not only derives from its concentration on the body, but also in its considera-
tion of nonhuman animals. Uniquely, it features a chapter written by a crew
member who worked on Corpse Bride. Moreover, while this anthology analy-
ses films that have already been scrutinised many times over, it also entails a
study of Burton’s two most recent films, Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar
Children (2016) and Dumbo (2019). The volume comprises nineteen chapters
in all that are categorised according to themes corresponding to the various
types of body that predominantly populate Burton’s films, namely: ‘animated
bodies’, ‘creaturely bodies’, ‘corporeal bodies’ and, finally, ‘Gothic, monstrous
and peculiar bodies’. Discussion chiefly spans his cinematic outputs, with
Samantha Moore’s chapter on metamorphosis and transformation introducing
the theme of ‘Animated Bodies’ in Part One. Noting Burton’s early affiliation
with Disney studios, she discusses how Burton exploits the various properties
of animation before explaining that he employs metamorphosis in several
ways. First, she suggests that it may be instigated via the actions of characters,
for example, in Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street; secondly,
via unresolved metamorphic longing; and thirdly, in literal metamorphic
change as in Beetlejuice and Alice in Wonderland, which Moore analyses as
case studies. Also contributing to ‘Animated Bodies’ is Emily Mantell, who
recounts her experiences of working on Corpse Bride as a ‘Burton Body’.
Mantell describes the development of the story and reveals how story teams
and their ideas informed the final script. Further focusing on Corpse Bride,
Elif Boyacioğlu considers the relationship between animation and the Gothic,
paying particular attention to the uncanny, especially in its connection to
stop-motion animation techniques. Analysing Corpse Bride as an example

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stella hockenhull and fran pheasant-kelly

of Burton’s creative hybridisation of genres, she centres on its Gothic and

comic treatment of the animated corpse. Christopher Holliday’s chapter on
Tim Burton’s ‘unruly bodies’ completes Part One, whereby he acknowledges
qualities of unruliness in the director’s artistic practices, expressive film style,
his industrial position at the margins and even in his appearance. Referring
to Corpse Bride and Frankenweenie, Holliday first considers the cultural and
gendered values of unruliness when applied to Burton’s animated bodies. He
then analyses Burton’s animated bodies in light of the fundamental unruliness
of stop-motion aesthetics.
Part Two, ‘Creaturely Bodies’, details the role of the nonhuman animal
in Burton’s films, and opens with Christopher Parr’s analysis of the crea-
turely politics of Planet of the Apes. Parr explores how the apes in Burton’s
reimagining are ambivalently signalled as racial others in a way that reflects
similar coding in prior films of the franchise and several of Burton’s previ-
ous outputs. The chapter considers Burton’s version in relation to Franklin
Schaffner’s earlier adaptation (1968) and contributes to the discussion sur-
rounding race in Burton’s films. ‘Creaturely Bodies’ also takes into account
the theme of dead pets, explored first by Rebecca Lloyd who debates how
Burton’s productions, predominantly Gothic in tone and seemingly celebrating
excess and transgression, in fact reveal the meanings attached to the animal
form that maintain human dominance over the animal body. Lloyd analyses
Vincent, The Nightmare Before Christmas, Mars Attacks!, Corpse Bride and
both versions of Frankenweenie, where animals are central to the narrative,
to explain how representations of humans and animals castigate transgression
of boundaries and the excessive body. Relatedly, Claire Parkinson considers
dead dogs, albeit contextualised as autobiographical references to Burton’s
own pets. Framed by the concept of children’s horror, Parkinson explores the
repeated depictions of dead dogs and the cultural and social meanings attached
to the bodies of animals, pet death and grief. In contrast, Stella Hockenhull’s
chapter centres on the lesser role of the horse and its appearance in the Gothic
horror adaptation, Sleepy Hollow. Engaging with Monica Mattfield’s (2017)
concept of ‘becoming centaur’, whereby the body of a horse enables its rider
a heightened masculinity, Hockenhull discusses the representation of the
headless Horseman, in combination with his black stallion, Daredevil, but
extends Mattfield’s concept to suggest a sublime effect: a symbol of monstrous
masculinity or, in this case, ‘becoming monstrous centaur’. In the final chapter
of ‘Creaturely Bodies’, and making connections between Burton’s fixation
with misfits, outsiders and unusual bodies, Frances Pheasant-Kelly analyses
Burton’s incarnation of Sharpsteen’s 1941 classic, Dumbo. She contends that
while Burton’s adaptation follows the original, it concurrently addresses con-
temporary concerns for animal welfare by first highlighting the human/animal
divide, and then diegetically operating to close this gap. The chapter also

10
 introduction

considers the position of Disney productions in the technologising of animals

to situate anthropomorphised creatures on the side of a dialectic opposed to
‘animal’.
Elsa Colombani’s analysis of cannibalism in Charlie and the Chocolate
Factory (2005) and Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street opens
Part Three of the collection, titled ‘Corporeal Bodies’. Colombani explores the
similarities and evolutions from the metaphorical cannibalism of the former to
the literal anthropophagy of the latter, charting the disappearance of the indi-
vidual body into the mass of consumerist society to its reappearance through
the body pieces of the cannibalised as well as that of the cannibal. Also investi-
gating corporeality, Cath Davies examines the relationship between dissolving
bodies and materials in Burton’s work. Her essay centres on the interweaving
of textures, surfaces and materiality of characters in The Nightmare Before
Christmas and Corpse Bride to probe how they gain agency through clothing.
Correspondingly, Helena Bassil-Morozow considers the physical or psycho-
logical brokenness of Burton’s characters. Expressly, Bassil-Morozow inter-
rogates the ways in which images of hands and eyes are utilised by Burton in a
range of his films, with a focus on Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Sweeney
Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street and Big Eyes (2014); she argues that
the literal or narrative fragmentation of characters reflects the intrinsic conflict
of modernity – that between individual identity and societal conformity. In
the vein of fragmented bodies, Fernando Gabriel Pagnoni Berns scrutinises
Burton’s direction of ‘Alfred Hitchcock Presents: The Jar’ (season 1, episode
19) (1986), a television episode that pivots around a disembodied organ, and is
therefore relevant to this collection. Berns suggests that Burton’s preference for
experimental narratives runs through the ways that he reimagines the human
body and, even when working with actors rather than puppets, he reconfigures
the body to dispense with realism. In this regard, Berns argues that ‘The Jar’ is
a manifesto of things to come, with Burton’s ideas on artifice and the antirealist
body emerging in subsequent productions such as Beetlejuice, Sleepy Hollow
and Big Eyes. Such reconfiguration of the body is likewise identified by Peter
Piatkowski in his analysis of Batman Returns (1992). Engaging theoretically
with the work of Richard Dyer (2004) on stars, Piatkowski first identifies a
stable of performers with whom Burton typically works, including Johnny
Depp, Helena Bonham Carter and Danny DeVito, and notes how these actors
each have unconventional star images that conform to his characters and
style. However, in Batman Returns, Piatkowski notes that he deviates from
this method of casting by including Michelle Pfeiffer, whose screen persona
is defined by her glamour and whose onscreen image is that of a traditional
classic Hollywood star. Piatkowski’s essay examines how Burton uses Pfeiffer’s
star image to advantage and then dismantles it through her corporeal and
psychological deterioration.

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stella hockenhull and fran pheasant-kelly

The final part of this collection, ‘Gothic, Monstrous and Peculiar Bodies’,
begins with Michael Lipiner and Thomas J. Cobb’s analysis of the grotesque
social outcast in Burton’s oeuvre. Lipiner and Cobb focus on how his cinematic
treatment of the grotesque, in all its incarnations, shapes this figure to mirror
mainstream American culture in the guise of a Gothic or cultural body, often
metaphorical of popular lore, and which appears in the various forms of a
persecuted monster. Examining Beetlejuice, Edward Scissorhands, Batman
Returns and Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children, the essay suggests
that Burton’s manifestation of the grotesque offers universal and multifaceted
implications, thereby subverting the homogeneity of American suburbia. Marie
Liénard-Yeterian also discusses the grotesque in Miss Peregrine’s Home for
Peculiar Children and explores the cultural work performed by the assorted
curious and monstrous bodies in the film’s imaginary world, while addressing
Burton’s ability to interweave different generic traditions. Specifically, Liénard-
Yeterian debates the notion of ‘monster’ embedded in the motif of these curious
bodies, which are poised at the intersection of the Gothic and the grotesque in
their staging of an encounter with terror. José Duarte and Ana Rita Martins too
consider Burton’s representation of monstrosity in their study of Big Fish (2003).
Their essay enquires into the importance of weird and monstrous bodies while
also identifying the work of American photographer Diane Arbus as a potential
visual inspiration for the film. It further analyses the unusual bodies presented in
the diegetic stories told by protagonist Edward Bloom (Albert Finney) and sug-
gests that they propose a chance to consider changes in how anomalous bodies
are viewed in the ‘real’ world. Peculiar and unusual bodies are at the centre of
Alex Hackett’s analysis of Edward Scissorhands and Charlie and the Chocolate
Factory. Adopting a psychoanalytical approach, Hackett contends that both
protagonists are asexual beings, thereby differing from previous analyses of sex-
uality in Burton’s films. The final contribution to the book examines ‘Burton’s
Benevolently Monstrous Frankensteins’. Here, Robert Geal reappraises Edward
Scissorhands and Frankenweenie to interrogate usual interpretations of Burton’s
films that celebrate outsider status. Rather, Geal challenges these to suggest
that Burton’s intertexual engagements with Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein
[1818] (1974), which inform the aforementioned films, include elements that are
progressive, but compromise these aspects with arguably misogynistic revisions
that invert some of the novel’s proto-feminist potential.
In all, Tim Burton’s cinematic world of human and nonhuman bodies in their
various forms provides a unique point of departure to present a range of new
ideas and theoretical frameworks that enable innovative insights into his work.

Note
1. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1014759/ (accessed 30 June 2020).

12
 PART ONE
ANIMATED BODIES
 1. TRANSFORMATION:
METAMORPHOSIS, ANIMATION
AND FAIRY TALE IN THE WORK OF
TIM BURTON

Samantha Moore

Animation has always been a haven for eccentrics and misfits, a place for film-
makers who have a singular vision and where the laws of physics rarely apply.
Everything in animation is fabricated, often from the feverish imagination
of a single individual, so it is the natural habitat of the auteur. Animation is
the form which Tim Burton gravitated towards as a child; he recalls the stop-
motion animation of Ray Harryhausen in Jason and the Argonauts (Chaffey
1963) having a profound effect on him, stating, ‘I’ve always loved monsters and
monster movies’ (in Salisbury 2006: 2). This mode of moving image also offers
evidence that we cannot believe and, according to Paul Wells, the liminal space
between real and unreal is where much of the deliciousness of animation lives
(Wells 1998: 20). Moreover, animation allows for the possibility of impossible
change, of metamorphosis either figurative or literal. Burton’s early short
animated film, Vincent (1982), is about a young boy longing to metamorphose
into his hero, Vincent Price. As Burton suggests, ‘[i]t’s like at Hallowe’en,
people dress up and it allows them to get a little wilder, they become something
else. That’s one of the aspects of film making that I’ve constantly enjoyed, the
transformation of people’ (in Salisbury 2006: 56). Many of Burton’s films
have metamorphosis at their heart, but less often in the literal than the figura-
tive sense. He gives us metamorphic process instigated by his characters, for
example, in Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (2007), where
Benjamin Barker/Sweeney Todd (Johnny Depp) and Nellie Lovett (Helena
Bonham Carter) turn their victims into pies. Most poignantly (and most often),
he presents the spectator with unresolved metamorphic longing, for instance

15
samantha moore

in Edward Scissorhands (1990), whose titular character longs to transform.

Occasionally he gives us literal metamorphic change, as in Beetlejuice (1988)
and Alice in Wonderland (2010), which will be explored in more detail in this
chapter. Metamorphosis will also be examined as it relates to the subversive
nature of animation, and the uncomfortable relationship that one of Burton’s
key influencers, Disney Studios, has had with it.
Metamorphosis in animation is the fluid transformation, frame by frame, of
one thing (person, object, animal) into another. It can be done via any animated
medium – clay, model, paint, drawing or computer-generated imagery (CGI)
– and can be used in assorted ways for a variety of reasons. Metamorphosis
can replace editing tasks such as scene cuts; as Barry Purves points out (2014:
184), to edit in-camera seamlessly and lyrically may be achieved by using
under-the-camera techniques such as those employed in Caroline Leaf’s oil
paint on glass film, The Street (1976). Furthermore, it can be utilised to
condense information, space or time, for example in The Owl Who Married a
Goose, another Leaf film (1974), where a water splash turns into snow falling
to signal seasons turning. Metamorphosis can be used to draw comparisons
between apparently unrelated subjects, or to create an emotional reaction, for
example in Bill Plympton’s Your Face (1987) which, with its ‘nearly continu-
ous metamorphosis of body violations and self-ingestions’, concentrates solely
on ‘a man’s insipidly smiling face’ (Crafton 2012: 279–80), provoking humour
and the uncanny.
From attending the California Institute of the Arts’ (CalArts) animation
programme to getting his first job working on the animated feature The
Fox and the Hound (1981), Burton was steeped in traditional Disney ani-
mation training. This was despite its clear disconnection, artistically and
philosophically, from his signature style. His recollection of his time at
CalArts and Disney is ambivalent at best, but it cannot be denied that by
hiring him, ‘Disney gave Burton a source of income and an identity – the
identity of an animator, which he retains to this day’ (McMahan 2005: 22).
Burton acknowledges that the animation training he received has inflected
his visual vocabulary ever since: ‘[h]aving a background in animation sort
of broadens the scope of what you can do visually’ (in Salisbury 2006: 51).
Metamorphosis is a fundamental part of the vocabulary of animation, but
it became forbidden at Disney as they pursued ‘believability’ of characters
above all else (Pallant 2011: 35). Therefore, the neat animation trick of
metamorphosis, that vital tool for instigating disturbance, was ignored by
the company that trained him and, arguably, this influenced the ways that he
used it in his films.
Whenever metamorphosis is used in film it creates a disorderly presence:
disrupting character, undermining the film structure or upsetting internal logic.
According to Norman Klein, the frame becomes an ‘unreliable space [which

16
 transformation

reveals] the mechanisms of the medium’ (in Wells, 1998: 134). Metamorphosis
draws attention to the anarchic nature of the animated form. It does not bother
to disguise its temperamental similarities to dream or delusion and makes no
attempt to present a realistic perspective on a standard timescale. There is an
inherent untrustworthiness about metamorphosis: it recalls dreams, night-
mares and hallucinations, states we have experienced but in an unreal internal
sense, and so to see it made manifest is profoundly unsettling. Vivian Sobchack
comments about morphing, stating that ‘its effortless shape shifting, its confu-
sions of the animate and inanimate [. . .] its homogenizing consumption of
others and otherness, are uncanny – uncanny not only in the sense of being
strange and unfamiliar but also in the sense of being strangely familiar’ (2000:
xi). Morphing broadcasts animation’s ability to represent the interior but, in
the style of dreams, we have no idea where it is going. Donald Crafton sees
the metamorphic process as partially malign: a cannibalistic, self-destructive
exercise on the part of the animator. As he states,

Metamorphosis is autophagic in two fundamental ways. Set in motion

by the animators – or their primordial hand – the forms come into being
swallowing up the ones before them and cease to exist when they are
eaten up by their successors. And, to the extent that the on-screen bodies
represent the animators’ creative processes, their termination reflects the
demise of the filmmaker. (2012: 278)

This destructive model is particularly true for stop-motion animation made in

front of the camera, like Leaf’s direct animation (paint, or sand, on glass) or
Jan Svankmajer’s clay models that must literally be destroyed before the next
frame can be made.
Wells posits that metamorphosis may be the central defining quality of
animation itself (1998: 69) because, for him, it is unique to the animated
form. Metamorphosis can be used in a live- action frame by borrowing from
stop-motion and utilising techniques like time-lapse (taking individual frames
at set intervals and then playing them back continuously, to give the effect
of time speeding up/caving in), as exemplified in Peter Greenaway’s A Zed
and Two Noughts (1985). Time-lapse, as in all forms of metamorphosis,
can be profoundly unsettling and emotionally distancing to watch, since it is
related to life, but is not lifelike at the speed we experience it. For example, in
Greenaway’s film, a dead swan writhes, zombie-like, as its body festers, while
a dead crocodile appears to be breathing post-mortem as its stomach swells
and sinks during the rotting process. However, metamorphosis in this sense (in
camera, using real objects or people) can only be in one direction – that of time
passing: the signs of growing, ageing, decaying. Animated metamorphosis,
on the other hand, has what Sergei Eisenstein describes as ‘freedom from

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samantha moore

ossification’ and is not tied to ‘the rungs of the evolutionary ladder’ (1986: 5).
Cause and effect are not necessary with animated metamorphosis – one can
have effect, effect and effect ad infinitum, leaving the cause open to the opinion
of the viewer. Blu’s Muto (2007/8) is an animated, life-sized graffiti film shot
in a city, with the normal urban population relegated to mayflies while the
animation ploughs through the cityscape at several times the size and a fraction
of the speed of everything else. As Crafton states, ‘Blu pushes the bodies of
his grotesque beings through never-ending metamorphoses based on cycles of
parthenogenesis and reincarnation’ (2012: 272). The characters circle through
endless loops without discernible narrative structure, but with a compelling
visual style that no other medium could achieve.
Metamorphosis, then, is grotesque, nightmarish, disorienting, destructive,
unsettling and uncanny: qualities it shares with the fairy tale and that may
be associated with Burton’s work. However, as noted, unlike the fairy tale,
metamorphosis was explicitly rejected by Disney. As a fledgling animator,
Burton’s early training came exclusively from Disney, which had a monocul-
tural approach to the way that animation should be made. Concerning his time
at Disney, Burton says:

[i]t was like being in the army; I’ve never been in the army, but the Disney
programme is probably about as close as I’ll ever get. You’re taught by
Disney people, you’re taught the Disney philosophy. It was kind of a
funny atmosphere, but it was the first time I had been with a group with
similar interests. (in Salisbury 2006: 7)

Burton did not explicitly choose Disney, but rather, as animation director
and fellow CalArts alumnus Brad Bird said, ‘it was literally the only game in
town’ (in Kashner 2014). Disney was the pre-eminent animation company
in the world at that point and in many ways had defined what animation
was seen to be capable of, prioritising ‘artistic sophistication, “realism” in
characters and contexts, and, above all, believability’ (Pallant 2011: 35) in
their films. Disney’s work was famously admired by Eisenstein for their use
of metamorphosis in its ‘ability to dynamically assume any form’ (1986: 5).
Ironically, what he admired them most for they rejected after the success
of Snow White (Hand et al. 1937) and the comparative failure of the more
visually inventive Fantasia (Algar et al. 1940). Such striving for realism and
believability meant that they rejected the very thing – metamorphosis – that
gave animation its disruptive edge, and the disruptive edge was what made it
a tempting medium for Burton. This was the start of an equivocal relationship
between Burton and Disney. He needed their support but the basic tenets of
Disney’s beliefs (order, reality) were at odds with his own (disruption, outsider
status). Burton’s own sensibility was much more in tune with an early rival of

18
 transformation

Disney studios, the Fleischer Brothers, whose privileging of visual spectacle

over character development better suited his filmic concerns.
Unsurprisingly perhaps, metamorphosis is not represented in the ‘twelve
principles of animation’. These were a set of axioms famously recorded by
Ollie Johnston and Frank Thomas, two of Disney’s ‘nine old men’.1 The
twelve principles are essentially a set of technical rules for animators, designed
to create believable physicality in Disney’s animated worlds, which was
increasingly the aim of their work as it developed through the first half of the
twentieth century. These principles include squash and stretch, anticipation,
staging, straight ahead action and pose to pose, follow through and overlap-
ping action, ease in and ease out, arc, secondary action, timing, exaggeration,
solid drawing and appeal. Of the twelve principles, arguably only ‘exaggera-
tion’ is not directly related to making the animated movement more realistic,
and even that must take its cue from the internal believability of the work.
Metamorphosis, however, is the opposite of the realistic/believable physicality
of the twelve principles and bears no reference to reality. Klein points out that
as ‘the transformation begins [. . .] the laws of nature collapse’ (2000: 21), and
that collapse could not be allowed to happen in a Disney film.
Burton would have been aware of the twelve principles when he joined the
Disney-funded CalArts’ animation programme in 1976, and adherence to this
methodology was the one which he was meant to be apprenticed to during
his time at Disney when he entered the company proper in 1979. Disney at
this time was very catholic in the individual styles of the animators it took on:
‘rough or clean, intuitive or analytical, it did not matter. It was the combina-
tion of styles that made Disney films rich and nuanced’ (Johnston and Thomas
1995: 95–6). However diverse or unusual the personal style of the animator
was, the end result would always have to be ironed out to look like a Disney
product. Burton says, ‘what’s odd about Disney is that they want you to be
an artist, but at the same time they want you to be a zombie factory worker
and have no personality. It takes a very special person to make those two sides
of your brain co-exist. So I was very emotionally agitated at that time and
couldn’t function very well’ (in Salisbury 2006: 10). Animation director Gary
Trousdale is quoted by Sam Kashner as saying that Disney ‘didn’t know what
the hell to do with Tim. They were scared of him. So they just stuck him into
an office. That’s when he came up with the original [1984] “Frankenweenie”’
(2014). Burton would continue to wrestle with this coexistence of being an
insider and simultaneously an outsider throughout his work.
In order to identify how Disney’s lack of metamorphosis inflects its storytell-
ing in comparison to other studios of the era, two treatments of the same scene
are examined: the wicked queen’s transformation in films of the Snow White
fairy tale. As noted, metamorphosis has no place in the twelve fundamental
principles of animation and, in fact, as a tool, is barely used by Disney. Disney’s

19
samantha moore

emphasis was on the ‘believability’ of the movement and characters, sometimes

characterised as ‘realism’. Chris Pallant notes that ‘as a product of Disney’s
insistence on realism in Snow White, cartoonal metamorphosis is, with the
exception of the Queen’s transformation into the witch, largely absent’ (2011:
43). Arguably, ‘cartoonal metamorphosis’ is thin even here: almost all this
sequence could have been achieved with straight editing of a live-action scene.
The 1937 Disney scene is entirely plot- and narrative-dependent; as Wells
points out, the transformation scene brings ‘clarity to an extended narrative’
by using the narrative function of ‘a disguise’ (1998: 73), rather than emphasis-
ing the magical nature of a transformation. This scene is a key plot point in the
film and shows the lengths to which the queen (Lucille La Verne) will go to get
her way rather than highlighting her magical capability.
The spectator is given a breakdown of the ways in which the queen’s ‘dis-
guise’ will function (voice, hair and hands) in the future plot development
of fooling Snow White (Adriana Caselotti). It is also couched in terms of
character; there is a strong sense of her feelings of sacrificing her youth and
beauty, her intense physical pain is clearly signalled, and finally her malicious
glee is evident as she completes the protracted and difficult process. The trans-
formation itself uses little actual metamorphosis in its animation; it depends
on live-action techniques like an out-of-focus ‘camera’ shot as the queen drinks
the potion. The only metamorphosis happens as the hair whitens (although her
face remains the same) and a close-up reveals the hands ageing dramatically
into those of a crone. The scene uses a theatrical rather than metamorphic
flourish to provide the final reveal: a swirl of the queen’s sleeve as she shows
her hag face to ‘camera’, the sequence using the language of live action almost
exclusively. This is entirely in tune with Disney’s intentions for the animation.
Klein cites Johnston and Thomas, suggesting that ‘[w]hen the animator distorts
the figure, he [sic] must always come back to the original shape. Donald and
Goofy can be made to bulge and implode but must never lose their “personal-
ity”, never turn into other things in the way Warner’s characters did [italics in
original]’ (2000: 25).
Comparing this to the Fleischer Brothers’ version of Snow White (1933),
the queen (Mae Questel) is shown simply stepping through her mirror, which
serves as a metamorphic plane, as she steps from queen into hag with an insou-
ciant bravado. There is no sense that this sequence is plot driven; it is a gag (the
mirror tells her to hide her face so she changes into someone else). It is not even
the first time she has metamorphosed in the film: during Betty’s (Mae Questel)
first meeting with her she briefly becomes a pan of two fried eggs for no other
apparent reason than, with her unusually long nose and googly eyes, her three-
quarter-view face looks like a frying pan of eggs. The metamorphic sequences
in the Fleischer film do not rely on character and plot development to drive
them (there’s no good reason that the Fleischer queen should turn into a hag

20
 transformation

other than that it is an accepted plot point for this fairy tale). Jack Zipes asserts
that ‘[t]he Fleischers rarely worked from a script, and even if they did, they
would ad lib and change it beyond recognition’ (2011: 120), and this feeling
of spontaneous fun with no high emotional stakes pervades the film. In the
Fleischer Snow White, the wicked queen uses her magic metamorphic mirror
to turn Koko (Cab Calloway) the clown into a ghost, with weirdly long legs
and a creepily familiar rotoscoped animation based on Calloway’s movements.
As Sobchack describes it, the metamorphosis in this case has ‘transformed the
structure of spectatorial pleasure’, disrupting ‘the spectator’s traditional modes
of identification with central human characters and displac[ing] them’ (2000:
xix–xx). He is no longer Koko but he continues to sing as if no change has been
effected, perpetuating the dreamlike atmosphere.
Eventually the queen’s final metamorphic sequence begins when the mischie-
vous mirror rebels against her and turns her into a dragon, disappearing itself
at this point. Finally, she turns inside out like a giant sock and the story ends.
This kind of fundamental character transformation (size, shape, species) could
not have happened at Disney, where character was far more revered. According
to Disney, Klein says, ‘once a character’s body was shown – rubbery, watery,
humanlike – its substance was irreducible. Walt was convinced that revealing
the drawing behind the flesh could wreck the atmospheric effects that he prized
so highly’ (2000: 25). Significantly, Johnston and Thomas argue, rather wist-
fully, ‘[w]e still wonder what we would be working on today if Fantasia had
been as successful as Snow White’ (1995: 511). However, as Pallant points out,
‘the financial and critical success of Snow White, coupled with the comparative
failure of Fantasia (1940), led to the former becoming an aesthetic blueprint
for much of the Disney-Formalist period. The artistic paradigm promoted
by Snow White has since become known as “hyperrealism”’ (2011: 35–6).
Burton’s perspective was indelibly shaped – both positively and negatively – by
the Disney ideology. As he argues,

Because I’ve never read, my fairy tales were . . . monster movies. To

me they’re fairly similar. I mean, fairy tales are extremely violent
and extremely symbolic and disturbing, probably even more so than
Frankenstein and stuff like that, which are kind of mythic and perceived
as fairy-tale like. But fairy tales, like the Grimms’ fairy tales, are prob-
ably closer to movies like The Brain that Wouldn’t Die, much rougher,
harsher, full of bizarre symbolism. (in Salisbury 2006: 3)

The fairy tale is such a familiar subject of animation as to be almost synony-

mous with it. Metamorphosis is a key ingredient of fairy tale; in fact, Marina
Warner argues that the fairy-tale form is defined by metamorphosis. As she
avers, ‘More so than the presence of fairies, the moral function, the imagined

21
samantha moore

antiquity and oral anonymity of the ultimate source, and the happy ending
[. . .] metamorphosis defines the fairy tale’ (1995: xv–xvi). Fairy tale is also
a recurring concern of Burton’s, although he says, ‘I think I didn’t like fairy
tales specifically. I liked the idea of them more [italics in original]’ (in Salisbury
2006: 3). Burton’s fairy tales are filtered through his own lens of concerns
and ideas, much like Disney’s were, and emerge similarly askew as a result. If
metamorphosis, as Sobchack says, ‘reminds us of our true instability’ (2000:
xii), then so do fairy tales, with stability under constant threat from wolves and
wicked witches, poverty and familial deaths.
Burton’s affinity with the fairy tale is clear, and this unstable base gives him a
good opportunity to explore his love/hate relationship with the status quo: the
untransformed. Even when he is using original material, such as in Beetlejuice
(1988), the characters are very clearly fairy-tale inflected and therefore dis-
posed to metamorphosis. The Maitlands are the isolated but unspectacularly
ordinary husband and wife who wish for a child, and the Deetz family are
the inattentive king and needling stepmother who have a poor unfortunate
(step) daughter. In typical Burton style, the sympathetic protagonists are the
monsters (the ghosts of the Maitlands), and the antagonist usurpers (the Deetz
family and entourage) are the legitimate house-owners. The ‘good fairy’ who
effects transformation is Betelgeuse (Michael Keaton) himself, a grotesque
character mixing an anarchic cartoon sensibility (definitely not Disney) with
creepy sexual innuendo. Metamorphosis is used by the marginalised charac-
ters, often as defence. Barbara Maitland (Geena Davies) attempts to use meta-
morphosis as a way of scaring the Deetzes from ‘her’ house; she transforms
into Hallowe’en mask cliché (faces ripped off, eyeballs popping out) but the
pretentious Deetzes’ horror is triggered only by the bland interior decorating
and her metamorphosis remains unseen, so she changes back.
Betelgeuse, unlike the Maitlands, is unselfconsciously metamorphic through-
out the film. He uses his metamorphic power as the ultimate childlike wish
fulfilment (‘if I had a magic wand . . .’) to magically transform any given
situation. Zipes states that animation applied to fairy tales involves ‘first and
foremost transformation’ (2011: 82) because only there can we see instantane-
ous punishment applied, justice dispensed and desires granted. Betelgeuse is
first seen as a drawn advert: part man, part beetle, holding a huge hammer.
Next, he is part of a diorama, uncannily real but on the scale of the ‘tiny’
models he is among. He casually changes or distorts parts of himself at will;
for example, when he is attempting to persuade the Maitlands to hire him,
his outfit changes to mirror Adam’s (Alec Baldwin) clothes. Sound and visual
effects are used to make clear his similarity to a riotous cartoon character;
smoke comes out of his hat, his head swivels uncontrollably, and ‘cartoon’
sound effects accompany some of his movements – like the lewd squeeze of
his groin in salute to the departing Maitlands, emphasised by the sound of a

22
 transformation

car horn. In the scene where he first encounters the Deetz family, his metamor-
phosis into a monster is almost complete, except for his recognisable hair. He
becomes a snake-like creature, reminiscent of Harryhausen’s Medusa from
Clash of the Titans (1981), emerging nightmarishly from the stair banister
rail. When he is banished by Barbara Maitland and returns (in a car crash) to
the model town and his normal form, he sprouts knives from his body to stop
Barbara from picking him up to tell him off. Riffing off the phallic knives and
his sexual frustration, Betelgeuse conjures up a brothel complete with demonic
sex workers, horrifying the Maitlands.
Betelgeuse’s position as subversive agitator is rooted in the fact of his meta-
morphic ability. He is couched as plot instigator and troublemaker: a classic
fairy-tale trope like Rumpelstiltskin who creates as many problems as he
solves. Barbara and Adam Maitland explicitly take on metamorphosis as a
strategy to help them in their predicament, and yet their position as sympa-
thetic protagonists remains intact and unthreatened. Later in the film they
must scare on command to prove to their afterlife case worker, Juno (Sylvia
Sidney), that they can be effective ghosts. They metamorphose their heads into
grotesque masks which bear no resemblance to their normal faces, but – far
from losing their ‘personality’ as Disney feared metamorphosis would inevi-
tably effect – they remain familiar and recognisable. Adam sprouts eyeballs
on all his fingers, but clearly they are each as short-sighted as his original eyes
because he has to hold up his spectacles to them to look at Barbara. They need
to change quickly to their normal selves in the next scene when they unexpect-
edly meet Lydia (Winona Ryder), and Adam has a problem changing back;
but, as in the Fleischer brothers’ film, Snow White, the metamorphic change is
played purely as a throwaway visual gag, not a focus of the plot or reflection
on the character, and is not commented on in the dialogue.
In Beetlejuice the transformations come very deliberately via analogue stop-
motion and puppet-based effects rather than digital effects, which give a vital-
ity to the sequence and fulfil Burton’s visceral pleasure in stop-motion. As he
states, ‘Growing up watching the kinds of movies that I did, like Harryhausen
. . . I always found the effects to be a little more human. There’s a certain sort
of handmade quality about them’ (in Salisbury 2006: 62). When he inter-
viewed Harryhausen in 2012, Burton talked about the special energy created
through actually touching the puppet when stop-motion animation is created.
All animation is made frame by frame, whether digital or analogue. Hand-
drawn 2D animation or digital 3D animation can be reviewed and changed
incrementally, as the frames can be individually revisited. However, in ana-
logue stop-motion animation, mistakes or missteps cannot be smoothed out
afterwards because each take is a record of the animator’s performance in ani-
mating that model. If the sequence needs to be changed or slightly improved it
must be re-shot. In all the stop-motion animated sequences in Beetlejuice there

23
samantha moore

is an uncanny aura about their movement reminiscent of Harryhausen’s work,

which draws attention to their hand-constructed origins. The spectator is sub-
liminally aware of the hands that have made and moved them because they are
slightly imperfect and ‘kind of cheesy’ (Burton in Salisbury 2006: 61). Burton’s
love for and fascination with Harryhausen’s work is well documented; Jason
and the Argonauts is the first film that he remembers watching (in Salisbury
2006: 2), and in Corpse Bride (based on a Russian folk tale, 2005) there is a
homage to Harryhausen’s work in the skeleton song-and-dance scene. When
interviewing Harryhausen to coincide with the Blu-ray release of 20 Million
Miles To Earth (Juran 1957), Burton says passionately, ‘people don’t really
realise how beautiful and special animation itself is [. . .] three- dimensional
[computer] animation [. . .] I still don’t feel has the same quality’ as handmade
stop-motion animation (2012).
In Alice in Wonderland (2010), however, directed by Burton for Disney, the
animation is entirely CGI. When Alice (Mia Wasikowska) first shrinks in size
there is none of the cheesy, handmade effects of Beetlejuice; her flowing dress
immaculately blossoms up around her as she disappears within it. When she
steps into Wonderland, it is into a seamlessly integrated CGI environment,
designed to be seen in ‘Disney digital 3D’. Perhaps this is a logical extension
of Disney’s aspiration for the ‘hyperreal’ believability developed during Snow
White, culminating in the apparently ‘live action’ partially animated remakes
of Dumbo (Burton 2019) and The Lion King (Favreau 2019).
Alice is the most metamorphic being in this film but lacks agency; she changes
in relation to her environment and in reaction to her treatment by others in
Wonderland. She follows orders and instructions from people and things –
whether she is attending a garden party or obeying the command ‘drink me’
on a bottle – reluctantly but reliably. Her body is a site of conflict and her
body size is constantly commented on by others. At the same time, her passive
metamorphosis is helpful in allowing her to continue in her escape from the
real-world dilemma she finds herself in: ostensibly whether she should marry
her aristocratic suitor, Hamish (Leo Bill), but actually, in deciding who she is
and what she should do with her life. Warner points out that, in fairy tales,
while male beasts are usually under the influence of a malign curse, female ones
are frequently willing participants in their transformation, as they are often
running away from the advances of an unwelcome lover. ‘Their metamorpho-
sis changes their problematic fleshy envelope, which has inspired such undesir-
able desire, until a chosen, more suitable, more lovable lover can appear who
will answer the riddle, undo the animal spell, disclose their identity and their
beauty and release them to speak again’ (Warner 1995: 353–4). Burton’s Alice
superficially has more power than the typical transformed fairy-tale heroine;
at one point she says, ‘from the moment I fell down that rabbit hole I’ve been
told what I must do and who I must be. I’ve been shrunk, stretched, scratched,

24
 transformation

and stuffed into a teapot [. . .] this is my dream. I’ll decide where it goes from
here [emphasis in dialogue]’. Later, before the final battle is due to be fought,
with Alice as the champion who must defend them, the White Queen (Anne
Hathaway) tells her, ‘you cannot live your life to please others, the choice must
be yours’. However, the words seem hollow as Alice is as much a pawn of the
plot at the end as she was in the beginning. Since the Caterpillar’s ‘Oraculum’
foretold her slaying of the Jabberwocky at the start of the film, there does not
seem much of a choice to be made.
The original Lewis Carroll (1865) version of Alice in Wonderland is essen-
tially a metamorphic fairy story. Like animated metamorphosis, the story is full
of effect, effect and effect with little sign of a cause (or a plot) as Alice travels
from one strange character interaction and scenario to another. In Burton’s
Disney version, this metamorphic Wonderland is bracketed by a plot about
a hypocritical society where nothing is as it is meant to seem: her brother-
in-law is unfaithful, and her proposed fiancé does not like her very much.
The falsehoods are not allowed to be acknowledged by Alice as everyone
around her strives to keep the status quo intact. Wonderland here also seems
to be a series of multiple effects, but the metamorphoses that Alice undergoes
quickly become inextricably linked to the wider dilemma of how she literally
fits in, and so the cause becomes glaringly obvious. Zipes claims that Burton
‘queers the narrative of Alice in Wonderland by crossing genders, mixing
sexual identity, and creating all sorts of bizarre animated characters who
remind us that there is no such thing as normal, whether in reality or in our
imaginations’ (2011: 301). That is true to a point. For example, Alice changes
from an archetypal princess into a warrior-prince who slays the Jabberwocky,
but ultimately it always comes back to a patent binary conflict between good
and evil with little room for ambiguity or unpredictability; everything happens
in service of the plot. There is a duplicity in Burton’s delivery of the fairy-tale
ending. Angela Carter (1990), in the introduction to her Virago Book of Fairy
Tales, suggests that the goal of fairy tales is not to maintain the status quo, but
to fulfil wishes and create utopias, and this is something Burton struggles with.
The real world is far less attractive, colourful or appealing than the metamor-
phic wonderland, and yet, in film plots, the real world must be returned to for
the ending to make sense. Even in Beetlejuice, where at the end the dead and
undead happily coexist, the culmination is essentially very real-world-normal.
As Warner says of fairy tales, ‘magic paradoxically defines normality’ (1995:
133). Barbara and Adam Maitland become the suburban middle-class couple
with a child that they always longed to have, and the outcome is much duller
and less anarchic than the rest of the film despite the upbeat Harry Belafonte
soundtrack in the final scene.
In these examples of Burton’s work, the characters who inhabit or enter the
alternative as opposed to the real world are most likely to exhibit ­metamorphic

25
samantha moore

characteristics, and the metamorphic characters are by far the most empa-
thetic. In the Fleischer brothers’ Snow White, the wicked queen is the most
vital, interesting and keenly drawn character visible. Similarly, the spectator
has absolute sympathy with Burton’s metamorphic characters. Disney’s pur-
ported fear that metamorphosis would ruin the audience’s connection with the
believability of the character does not hold. Physical metamorphosis after all
is a universal human experience, whether via adolescence (Burton’s favour-
ite), accident, menopause, pregnancy or simple ageing. Metamorphosis brings
change and chaos, turning the world upside down, such as happens to Alice
in the scene where she experiences her first metamorphic transformation and
lands on the ceiling. As Klein states, during metamorphosis ‘gravity itself seems
to disappear’ (2000: 21). Burton’s empathy with the metamorphic characters is
matched by an uncompromising attitude to those who aspire to metamorphic
status but fail. The Deetz family and their interior decorator/ghost hunter,
Otho (Glenn Shadix), are constantly attempting to harness metamorphosis by
transforming the house themselves, via art materials, yet are thwarted in their
attempts to do so. The sycophantic courtiers who pretend to be outsiders to
ingratiate themselves with the Red Queen (Helena Bonham Carter) in Alice in
Wonderland are more despised than the villains. Only the true outsiders, the
undead Maitlands, the amoral Betelgeuse and the guileless Alice, are able to
transform at will.
Metamorphosis is life, vitality, excess, subversion, perversion, deviance: all
the fun stuff. Metamorphosis is specific to animation and being an animator
is ingrained in Burton’s identity as a filmmaker. Animation is a disruptive,
marginalised medium that constantly reinvents itself, more qualities that we
associate with the director’s best work.

Note
1. Disney’s ‘nine old men’ were the core animators from Disney’s ‘Golden Age’ of
drawn animation, from Snow White in the 1930s to The Rescuers in the 1970s.

26
 2. AGREEING TO BE A ‘BURTON BODY’:
DEVELOPING THE CORPSE BRIDE STORY

Emily Mantell

At the end of the day it’s not the technique that the audience cares
about; it’s a great story, a visual feast, and great characters. They want
to be taken on an emotional journey they have never been on before.
(Schneider in Lasseter 1995: 26)

A story team’s journey on an animated feature such as Corpse Bride (2005)

is similar to that of the audience. It is emotional, full of story and character,
has astounding visuals – and it is unlikely you will have experienced anything
like it before. When agreeing to work on Corpse Bride, you are agreeing to
wholeheartedly embody Tim Burton’s imagination. By signing the contracts,
you accede to keep production secrets and leave your life at the door for the
duration of your stay. In exchange, you enter the Burton world – you become a
‘Burton Body’, a crew member. You become dedicated to Burton’s incomplete
vision, you enter the ‘dark, edgy, and quirky realm of the “Burtonesque”’
(Salisbury 2006: xviii), and with this agreement there comes glory ‘but also its
own, unique set of difficulties, not least in the expectations that both studios
and audiences now have of him and his output’ (Salisbury 2006: xviii).
Sixteen years later I can reflect on my experience and the processes and write
with hindsight. I hope to give a fair account of what it is like to be a ‘Burton
Body’ and to explain what story development means on an animation feature.
This essay provides an overview of how story teams and their ideas inform the
final script, observing that the screenplay is not the beacon of light in stormy
seas, but more like a large ship loosely anchored nearby.

27
emily mantell

In 2004 I was one of the early crew

members on Tim Burton’s Corpse
Bride at Three Mills Studios, London.
My journey started in a large empty
room designated to the story depart-
ment, which would soon be bustling
with story artists. Where there were
once empty studios and offices, sud-
denly and intensely there is a surge
of energy and urgency; something
Figure 2.1 Topsy-turvy heads designed is created, and then as quickly as it
for portrait gallery in Victor’s house, arrives it disappears. Being part of
Emily Mantell, for Corpse Bride, 2005. that is special and difficult to explain.

Figure 2.2 Topsy-turvy heads designed for portrait gallery in Victor’s house,
Emily Mantell, for Corpse Bride, 2005.

Initially, there were early scripts, various pieces of concept art and produc-
tion designs, Tim Burton’s sketches, and a few storyboards. In the coming
months, my job was to help set up the story department with the production
crew and, later, to assist the storyboard artists with adapting their drawings
digitally and preparing them for the editing team. Over time my role evolved
to include more interesting creative tasks, including the Corpse Bride meta-
morphosis scene, topsy-turvy heads, script updates, concept art, concept art
updates, gag concepts, suggesting story changes in team meetings and more.

Agreeing to be a ‘Burton Body’

The term ‘Burton Body’ in this essay proposes the idea that the creative crew
on feature animation development embodies the story and the characters both
physically and mentally. It seems obvious to me now, but embodiment is a skill,
an essential creative tool that varies in ability. Similar to writers, story artists

28
 agreeing to be a ‘burton body’

are creating believable scenes, character arcs and emotional experiences that
audiences should be able to connect with. To do so effectively, the creator needs
to be able to emotionally and, at times, physically imagine themselves within
the story or as the character. The world’s leading TV showrunner/­producer/
writer, Shonda Rhimes, shares the ease with which this type of embodiment
came to her from a young age: ‘I’ve lived inside my head since I was a kid. My
earliest memories are of sitting on the floor of the kitchen pantry. I stayed there
for hours in the darkness and warmth, playing with the kingdom I created out
of canned goods’ (2015: 18).
The experience of being a crew member in the story team on Corpse Bride
was an all-encompassing endeavour. Daily, we were absorbed by the story,
the characters and the world. We rarely left ‘The Land of the Dead’ or the
‘Land of the Living’ and were immersed completely in the Corpse Bride world.
If we weren’t fabricating the events and emotions of the characters, then we
were designing the experience of the audience. Imagining and embodying,
this was our job. As Edwin Catmull notes, ‘People who take on complicated
creative projects become lost at some point in the process. It is the nature of
things – in order to create, you must internalize and almost become the project
for a while, and that near-fusing with the project is an essential part of its
emergence [italics in original]’ (2014: 91). To sustain long periods of work, the
management team creates a family-led environment. The crew’s embodiment
was emphasised in the campus-like environment of production. In addition to
this, your social life becomes crew-based, and regular after-work drinks and
themed crew parties, with sometimes dressing-up as characters from the film,
re-enforce the sense of an embodied experience.
A feature animated film can use anywhere between 300 and 500 cast and
crew members. There are many roles, some creative and some operational.
The operational crew, such as the production teams and accountants, argu-
ably have less involvement with the story and characters, and therefore their
embodiment is less intense. Their commitment and skills, however, enable the
submersion of the creative crew into the Tim Burton realm. Hierarchical status
on a feature animation doesn’t differ much from the corporate world: with
Tim Burton as founder and overseer of the film – executive producer (crea-
tive and operational), followed by Mike Johnson the director (lead creative),
Alison Abate the producer (lead operational) . . . and so it goes down through
the production crew until you get to production assistants and junior creatives.
On average, a feature animation can take anything between two and seven
years in production, but a mere 120 minutes to watch. A huge crew dedicate
themselves to a variety of tasks that go largely unnoticed, undocumented and
unused; some processes may make it onto the ‘special features – making of’,
and some ideas and assets may make it into the final film, but the majority
don’t. At the most basic level the entire crew embody the story by reading the

29
emily mantell

script; they scrutinise each update and are witness to the development of the
story as it moves forward. Meanwhile, they are surrounded by visuals created
for the film – concept art, character puppets, animation tests, animatics, story-
boards, sets and more. Eventually, and at varying different levels, the film and
crew become strangely entangled as the ‘tangible’ and ‘visible’ make their way
towards the final production.
As consumers of entertainment, art and culture we spend much of our
time immersed in the story, characters and experiences, whether it is games,
television, film, books or art. The more audiences/users are immersed, the
more they live vicariously through the story and the characters, and the
greater they embody the experience. As John Yorke notes, ‘It’s extraordinary
to see the process by which their feelings are sublimated and they become
inextricably linked with the fortunes of their fictional counterparts’ (2013: 3).
The more the audience embodies the character and story, the bigger the success
the makers of the story feel their work has been (box office figures aside).
Indeed, the creative crew are vital for this reason, and many talented individu-
als worked hard to complete the Corpse Bride vision. In the story team, our job
was to get a good story out of the script, then run it through our brains, hearts
and hands in the hope of making an authentic connection with the audience;
we, of course, wanted to deliver the film that audiences expect from Burton.
As Robert McKee maintains, ‘Our appetite for story is a reflection of the pro-
found human need to grasp the patterns of living, not merely as an intellectual
exercise, but within a very personal, emotional experience’ (1999: 12).
On Corpse Bride, the standard industry procedure of test screenings was
held, in this instance, for child audiences; they watched rough cuts of the
film, and their reactions were closely monitored by the crew. In general, facial
expressions and responses are observed and, when it goes well, children look
sad or happy in the right places, laugh when prompted, and leave with a sense
of experience; if they don’t react accordingly then it is back to the drawing
board (literally in some cases) for the crew. The emotions are monitored
because it is the clearest way of identifying whether the audience has connected
with the story and characters, and whether they too are embodying the experi-
ence designed for them.
The story team have a huge influence over character and story, and it is a
strange mix of working with micro details such as the emotional reactions of
the character, and macro issues such as story structure.
The micro details process demands the story artists psychologically put
themselves in the characters’ shoes and embody their personality. For me,
this practice necessitates deep concentration and working alone. The macro
changes occur where big story fixes are needed. This requires team meetings,
brainstorming, big-picture thinking, an ability to bounce ideas around and
a good level of confidence in your ideas. A good understanding of story in

30
 agreeing to be a ‘burton body’

general is important for the macro changes: knowing how character arcs work
and how to break up the pace of the film/narrative. The story team’s job is
to be objective and subjective almost simultaneously; they must see the story
objectively and be the characters subjectively. Often a scene would work for
the plot, but the character’s reaction wasn’t authentic. Every gag, camera
shot or story change has to be conceived, pitched, changed, pitched again and
eventually accepted (if you’re lucky).
Gags are the jokes that carry a scene through with visual humour; they
have a large history in animation and are rarely included in the script. A story
artist prides themself on getting a gag in the film and is usually congratulated
by the other members of the team when they do. As the lowest- ranking story
team member, I recall being celebrated by the rest of the story team when my
concept of the ‘secondhand store’ was accepted as a gag. Below you can see
the initial sketch (Figure 2.3) I nervously took to Mike Johnson. The amount
of work added to the sketch to get to the final look (Figure 2.4) is evident in
the images below.

Figure 2.3 Concept for Second Figure 2.4 Final appearance of

Hand Store scene, Emily Mantell, for Second Hand Store in Corpse Bride,
Corpse Bride, 2005. 2005.

For each line of text in the script there could be between five and fifty
drawings that demonstrate the mood of the scene, the attitude of the character
and that visually incorporate key plot points (story beats). The story team can
propose new ideas, or remove existing ones, and gradually they help to sculpt
the final film.
There are elements of personification that are not seen by the outside world
that add to the embodiment experience; an example of this was being asked
to be the voice of Victoria on the rough cut of the film (many of the crew did
the rough-cut voices). This meant acting the role, as well as trying to get the
emotional tone of voice accurate. This was at roughly the same time that I
was working on various visual expressions of Victoria’s predicament – living a

31
emily mantell

conformist life, forced into marrying someone she doesn’t love and gradually
losing her mind. I was asked to work on a wedding dress (Figure 2.5) that
made Victoria look constrained, which further inspired me to push Victoria’s
need for escape, so I designed her sewing a blanket that would work as a ladder
to aid her descent from the bedroom window (Figure 2.6).

Figure 2.5 Wedding dress for Figure 2.6 Victorian sewing

Victoria, Emily Mantell, for blanket, Emily Mantell, for
Corpse Bride, 2005. Corpse Bride, 2005.

The story artists are given scenes from the script to visualise, then ‘sell’ the
idea back to the director. This is a process which will often involve physically
‘performing the boards’ – using voices, high-energy storytelling and acting
the board; artists put immense effort into the process, hoping that it will be
approved. A performance sell may be done multiple times for each scene, and
for a moment, the character, scene and story artist become one. All of this
physical and cognitive embodiment is undertaken so that the audience truly
identifies with the characters in the story. Yorke likens the reader’s experience
of story to that of an avatar: ‘What an archetypal story does is introduce you
to a central character – the protagonist – and invite you to identify with them;
effectively they become your avatar in the drama. You live the experience of
the story vicariously through them: when they’re in jeopardy, you’re in jeop-
ardy; when they’re ecstatic, you are too’ (2013: 3). The concept of the crew
embodying story and character starts with the lead creative – Burton himself.
As Salisbury argues, ‘Burton remains a filmmaker whose modus operandi is
based entirely on his innermost feelings. For him to commit to a project it’s
necessary for him to connect emotionally to his characters’ (2006: xviii). Even
when describing the film after it has been made, Burton is deeply involved with
the characters emotionally: ‘You get everybody’s feelings, you sort of feel for
everybody involved in the triangle. You feel bad for Victoria, you feel equally
bad for Victor, and there’s manipulation on both sides, but you understand
it’ (in Salisbury 2006: 250). It was apparent in Tim Burton’s sketches (which

32
 agreeing to be a ‘burton body’

were pinned all around the story room) that he clearly empathised with and
embodied the characters he created; each drawing was full of emotion, move-
ment and energy and they remained a clear destination for the creative crew to
head towards. Despite the many design and story changes, the drawings were
the essence of the film.

Story Development
Animated features are mostly born in unconventional ways, with no set path.
Indeed, the creative industries, in general, are not for those that enjoy order
and protocol. Even within the in-house studios1 that have a steady crew and
accommodation, the journey towards the final film is not linear. Animation is
fundamentally the combination of two industries that thrive on creative chaos
(film and art), and both work because of exploration, trial and error. Corpse
Bride was no different; it was a hotbed of ideas, creativity, errors and restarts.
The first-time feature director, Mike Johnson, on collaborating on the project,
remarked:

One thing I learned from working with Tim is the importance of making
space for creative experimentation. To stay loose and allow yourself
time to play a bit. This isn’t easy to do with the demands of a hectic
schedule, but that creative spirit comes across on the screen, and I think
it’s a common thread of all films. It’s obvious he loves what he does. The
process is as important as the final product. (in Salisbury 2006: 25)

There is a common theme of a chaotic and confusing journey within anima-

tion feature development, even when an experienced leader with strong organi-
sational skills and good leadership philosophies, such as Ed Catmull (Pixar),
is at the helm of a production. The creative team still have to move slowly
through the dark waters that inevitably make a film manifest. As Catmull
notes, ‘Where once a movie’s writer/director had perspective, he or she loses it.
Where once he or she could see a forest, now there are only trees. The details
converge to obscure the whole, and that makes it difficult to move forward
substantially in any one direction’ (2014: 91).
In the film and animation industry the amount of work produced to ‘sell’ a
project to investors before the ‘green-light’ varies considerably, but tradition-
ally there would be a script involved. However, in the instance of Corpse Bride
there was nothing but a few Tim Burton sketches and the seedling of an idea.
As he stated, ‘they green-lit it [Corpse Bride] without a script – without any-
thing’ (Burton in Salisbury 2006: 250). This isn’t as uncommon as you might
assume, and Burton suggests a history of starting animated movies this way:
‘In getting started [on Corpse Bride] I sort of used Nightmare as the model.

33
emily mantell

And it’s not a good model . . . Nightmare was developed almost like the old
days at Disney’ (in Salisbury 2006: 250).
In the early days, Disney Studios worked heavily with existing fairy tales,
moving straight ahead into pre-production, and the visual concepts were as
much a part of the development as the script. Pre-production work, such as
concept art, character design and storyboards, was how the script developed,
and was written and updated alongside these processes. As Paul Wells notes,
‘Arguably, in many cases, the piles of sketches, storyboards, materials, arte-
facts and data files left at the end of the process in making an animated film,
are the script’ (2011: 89).
Despite the history of animation features developing story ‘in house’ through
pre-production development, Burton acknowledges the lack of pre-production
work and script at the ‘green-light’ stage, and also that Corpse Bride followed
in The Nightmare Before Christmas’s (Selick 1993) footsteps, heading straight
into pre-production without a script, perhaps causing more delays and story
problems than necessary. As noted above, Burton suggests that having a script
is preferable to not having one. McKee agrees; he believes that, despite the
vast amount of scripts produced and rejected by the film industry, there aren’t
enough good ones. This forces underdeveloped scripts to be rushed through to
production before they are ready, leading to big story fixes in the production
phases. McKee is mostly referring to live-action scripts, where traditionally
writers ‘patiently rewrite until the script is as director-ready, as actor-ready as
possible’ (1999: 7). Burton is relatively unusual as he has experience in both
live-action and animated feature films, giving him the perspective of working
with finalised scripts, working scripts and no script at all.
By the time Corpse Bride was proposed by Burton to Warner Brothers’
executives, the ‘Burton Brand’ had a track record of successful films, and a
serious global cult following with the merchandising deals to prove it. Thus,
it is not surprising that it was green-lit without a script. However, despite all
of Burton’s strengths, not having a script caused issues and the story team
had a long journey ahead. Burton’s script problems on Corpse Bride were
frustrating, and he admits that the foundations and relationships were weak:
‘I had scripts written, there were lots of people who worked on them. Carole
Thompson wrote a version, but then we kind of had an argument . . . And
then Pamela Pettler and John August came on board’ (in Salisbury 2006:
250). Later in production, the script issues would become more pressing as
we headed full speed into the production stages (animating) of the film. As a
result, the development of the Corpse Bride story was altered and influenced
by the scriptwriters and the story team equally: ‘The script has changed all the
way through, little bits of humour and business, kind of goes back to the old
days of Disney where it was story people shaping as it goes. There has been a
lot of that on this’ (Burton in Salisbury 2005: 25).

34
 agreeing to be a ‘burton body’

Figures 2.7–2.10 Possible effects of Land of the Dead on Land of the Living,
Emily Mantell, for Corpse Bride, 2005. Emily Mantell, for Corpse Bride, 2005.

An example of shaping things as we went along, and ideas that were played
with, can be seen in the images above (Figures 2.7–2.10). I was asked to do
some quick concepts of how the ‘Living’ might be positively affected by the
‘Dead’ and, from memory, the script we were working at the time had a similar
ending, but there were so many script alterations and ideas coming from the
story team that it was hard to keep track.
Many of the story concepts often come directly from the story department.
The Corpse Bride script was an ‘organic thing’ (Burton in Salisbury 2005: 26),
and the power and opportunities the story team had over the script were visible
in the final film. Starting with the big fixes, we met regularly for story meetings
where everyone was encouraged to throw ideas into the pot and battle out
major plot or character issues. Eventually, micro changes evolved into macro
changes: plot flaws turned out to be character issues. In the early stages of
Corpse Bride there were two key elements for the story team to work with: the
working scripts (which were already showing signs of being problematic), and
the Burton sketches which showed strong character ideas and fixed visuals.
The exact origins of the tale of the Corpse Bride are not clear – and Burton
doesn’t seem to care much for these details; he had a simple yet great concept

35
emily mantell

and proceeded. His inspiration came from a nineteenth-century Eastern

European folk tale about a young man who accidentally marries a corpse who
was ­murdered on the way to her wedding and is delivered to the Land of the
Dead; he has to fix the situation and then return to his living fiancé. Burton
made many character sketches, most of which didn’t exist in the original
tale, but gradually began to appear in the scripts, suggesting that the char-
acter sketches and ideas were leading the script but not necessarily helping
the plot. Furthermore, identifying a clear central protagonist is arguably one
of the largest plot/character issues a story can have, as it is this character
that the audience must identify with. As Burton said, ‘it was very difficult to
find the balance for it [Corpse Bride], the right balance of the emotional and
the humour, but also because it’s a triangle, sometimes with that triangle thing,
one character or another suffers. So, it became more the Corpse Bride’s story’
(in Salisbury 2006: 250). One of the ways in which Burton reached his decision
was to focus more on female characters and emotion. When he was working
on The Nightmare Before Christmas, the seed of Corpse Bride was already
growing in his mind. As he suggests, ‘One of the things I enjoyed on Nightmare
was the emotional quality that the Sally character had: there was something
there that I liked. It’s nice to get the emotion in animation. And also, I was
thinking about expanding my female characters. So, thinking about Corpse
Bride was trying to do something with that emotional quality to it’ (Burton in
Salisbury 2006: 248).
Making the character of Corpse Bride the protagonist is a logical choice
because, while Victor is struggling to work within the rules of the ‘Land of the
Living’, he isn’t as misunderstood as she is. In fact, ‘Burton’s characters are
often outsiders, misunderstood and misperceived, misfits encumbered by some
degree of duality, operating on the fringes of their own particular society, tol-
erated but pretty much left to their own devices’ (Salisbury 2006: xviii). There
were times in the story development where it was clear that Corpse Bride was
being sidelined for Victor’s story, and Burton’s confusions over the protagonist
and the story, in general, were duly experienced by the story team.
It gradually became apparent that despite Burton’s ability to envisage fan-
tastic film concepts, design beautiful characters and invent amazing worlds,
he wouldn’t be able to fix the escalating plot issues. Interestingly, this tallies
with Jeff Gerke’s (2010) well-argued point that if you are good at character
development then it is unlikely that you will be good at plot development. He
lists many examples of how successful creatives have overcome this issue by
collaborating with people who have the opposite talents. Tim Burton’s rela-
tionship with Danny Elfman is particularly significant in this context. Elfman
is fundamentally known for the sound and music on Burton’s film, but the
collaboration is more profound than that. Watching Elfman in interviews and
having felt his presence on Corpse Bride, it is clear that he has a strong control

36
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Outside we were joined by Doctor Leslie.
"What do you think of it?" he asked.
"A most peculiar tangle, to say the least," remarked Kennedy. "Just
consider it. Here are two couples—Wilford and Honora, Doctor
Lathrop and his wife, Vina. We may suspect, from what you found at
the office, something in the relations of Wilford and Vina. As to the
doctor and Honora—we don't know. Then, into the case seems to
have entered a fifth person, Vance Shattuck. Really, Leslie, I cannot
say anything now. It seems as though it might be quite complicated.
I shall have to visit them, talk with them, find out. You and Doyle
will keep me informed?"
"Certainly. And I will let you have the materials for your tests as
soon as possible."
As we left the apartment, Kennedy appeared preoccupied.
"Those dreams were peculiar," he remarked, slowly, almost to
himself.
I glanced at him quickly.
"You don't mean to say that you attach any importance to dreams?"
I remarked.
Kennedy merely shrugged.
But I knew from his actions that he did.
 II
THE MARBLE HEART

"I'
m going to get acquainted with the people in this case,"
remarked Kennedy, as he left the Wilford apartment, "and first
of all it will be with Vance Shattuck."
We found that Shattuck lived in a rather sumptuous bachelor
apartment farther up the Drive, to which we were admitted by his
Japanese valet, who led the way into a sort of den, then disappeared
to summon his master.
As we waited in the den I glanced about. It was a most attractive
and fascinating place. There were innumerable curios that seemed
to have been gathered from all over the world. Nor were they merely
thrown together in a jumble. It was artistic, too, with a masculine
art.
From the manner of the valet, though he had said nothing, I
somehow gathered that Shattuck had been waiting for something or
somebody. It was no longer early in the morning and I knew that he
must have been neglecting his business, that is, if he really had any
to neglect. I wondered why he should be doing so.
A few minutes later Shattuck himself appeared, a slim, debonair,
youngish-old man, with dark hair of the sort that turns iron-gray in
spots even in youth. Somehow he gave the impression of being a
man of few words, of being on guard even thus early in our
meeting.
"You have evidently traveled considerably," commented Kennedy, as
he entered and we introduced ourselves.
"Yes, a great deal, before the war," replied Shattuck, guardedly
watching.
"In Africa, I see," added Kennedy, who had been examining some
striking big-game photographs that hung on a side wall.
"Once I was in Africa—yes. But I contracted a fever there. It has left
me unable to stand the fatigue I used to stand. However, I'm all
right—otherwise—and good for a great many years in this climate—
so my doctor tells me."
"Doctor Lathrop?" suggested Kennedy, quickly.
Shattuck evaded replying. "To what am I indebted for the honor?" he
queried, coldly now, still standing and not offering us seats.
"I suppose you have heard of the death of Vail Wilford?" asked
Kennedy, coming directly to the point.
"Yes. I have just learned that he was found dead in his office, the
lights turned on, and with a note left by him to his wife. It's very
sudden."
"You were acquainted with Honora Wilford, I believe?"
Shattuck flashed a quick glance sidewise.
"We went to school together."
"And were engaged once, were you not?"
Shattuck looked at Kennedy keenly.
"Yes," he replied, hastily. "But what business of yours—or anybody's,
for that matter—is that?" A moment later he caught himself. "That
is," he added, "I mean—how did you know that? It was a sort of
secret, I thought, between us. She broke it off—not I."
"She broke off the engagement?"
"Yes—a story about an escapade of mine, and all that sort of thing,
that kind mutual friends do so well for one in repeating—but! by
Jove, I like your nerve, sir, to talk about it—to me. The fact of the
matter is, I prefer not to talk about it. There are some incidents in a
man's life, particularly where a woman is concerned, that are a
closed book."
He said it with a mixture of defiance and finality.
"Quite true," hastened Kennedy, briskly, "but a murder has been
committed. The police have been called in. Everything must be gone
over carefully. We can't stand on any ceremony now, you know—"
At that moment the telephone rang and Shattuck turned quickly
toward the hall as his valet padded in after having answered it softly.
"You will excuse me a moment?" he begged.
Was this call what he had been waiting for? I looked about, but
there was no chance to get into the hall or near enough in the den
to overhear.
While Shattuck was at the telephone, Kennedy paced across the
room to a bookcase. There he paused a moment and ran his eye
over the titles of some of the books. They were of a most curious
miscellaneous selection, showing that the reader had been
interested in pretty nearly every serious subject and somewhat more
than a mere dabbler. Kennedy bent down closer to be sure of one
title, and from where I was standing behind him I could catch sight
of it. It was a book on dreams translated from the works of Dr.
Sigmund Freud.
Kennedy continued to pace up and down.
Out in the hall Shattuck was still at the telephone and we could just
make out that he was talking in a very low tone, inaudible to us at a
distance. I wondered with whom it might be. From his manner,
which was about all we could observe, I gathered that it was a lady
with whom he talked. Few of us ever get over the feeling that in
some way we are in the presence of the person on the other end of
the wire. Could it have been with Honora Wilford herself that he was
talking?
A few moments later Shattuck returned from the telephone.
"Have you met Mrs. Wilford recently?" asked Kennedy, picking up the
conversation where he had been interrupted by the call.
Shattuck eyed Kennedy with hostility and grunted a surly negative. I
felt that it was a lie.
"I suppose you know that she has been suffering from nervous
trouble for some time?" he continued, calmly ignoring Shattuck's
answer, then adding, sarcastically, "I trust you won't consider it an
impertinence, Mr. Shattuck, if I ask you whether you were aware
that Doctor Lathrop was Mrs. Wilford's physician?"
"Yes, I am aware of it," returned Shattuck. "What of it?"
"He is yours, too, is he not?" asked Kennedy, pointedly.
Shattuck was plainly nettled by the question, especially as he could
not seem to follow whither Kennedy was drifting.
"He was once," he answered, testily. "But I gave him up."
"You gave him up?"
It has always been a source of enjoyment to me to watch Kennedy
badgering an unwilling and hostile witness. Shattuck was suddenly
finding himself to be far from the man of few words he thought
himself. It was not so much in what Kennedy asked as the manner in
which he asked it. Shattuck was immediately placed on the
defensive, much to his chagrin.
"Yes. I most strenuously object to being the subject of—what shall I
call it—perhaps—this mental vivisection, I suppose," he snapped,
vexed at himself for answering at all, yet finding himself under the
necessity of finishing what he had unwillingly begun under the lash
of Kennedy's quizzing.
Kennedy did not hesitate. "Why?" he asked. "Do you think that he
sometimes oversteps his mark in trying to find out about the mental
life of his patients?"
Shattuck managed to control a sharp reply that was trembling on his
tongue.
"I would rather say nothing about it," he shrugged.
"I see you are a student of Freud yourself," switched Kennedy,
quickly, with a nod toward the bookcase.
"And of many other things," retorted Shattuck. "You'll find about a
ton of literature in that bookcase."
"But it was about her dreams," persisted Kennedy, "that she
consulted Doctor Lathrop, I believe. Are you acquainted with the
nature of the dreams?"
Shattuck eyed him in silence. It was evident that he realized that the
only refuge from the quizzing lay in that direction.
"Really, sir," he said, at last, "I don't care to discuss a thing I know
nothing about any further."
He turned, as though only by a studied insult could he find escape. I
expected Kennedy to flare up, but he did not. Instead, he was
ominously polite.
"Thank you," he said, with a mocking sarcasm that angered Shattuck
the more. "I suppose I may reach you at your place of business,
later, if I need?"
Shattuck nodded, but I knew there was a mental reservation back of
it and that his switchboard operator would be given instructions to
scrutinize every call carefully, and that, should we call up, Mr.
Shattuck would have "just stepped out." As for Kennedy's tone, I
was sure that it boded no good for Shattuck himself. Perhaps
Kennedy reasoned that there would be plenty of other interviews
later and that it was not worth while fighting on the first.
On his part Shattuck could do no less than assume an equal
politeness as he bowed us out, though I know that inwardly he was
ready to consign us to the infernal regions.
Kennedy was no sooner in the street than he hastened to a near-by
telephone-booth. Evidently the same thought had been in his mind
as had been in mine. He called up Doyle at the Wilford apartment
immediately and inquired whether Honora Wilford had made any
telephone calls recently. To my surprise, though I will not say to his
own, he found out that she had not.
"Then who was it called Shattuck?" I queried. "I could have sworn
from his manner that he was talking to a woman. Could it have been
to the maid?"
He shook his head. "Celeste is watched, too, you know. No, it was
not Celeste that called up. He would never have talked that long nor
as deferentially to her. Never mind. We shall see."
Back on the Drive again, we walked hastily up-town a few squares
until we came to another apartment, where, in a first-floor window, I
saw a little sign in black letters on white, "Dr. Irvin Lathrop."
Fortunately it was at a time when Lathrop was just finishing his
office hours, and we had not long to wait until the last patient had
left after a consultation.
As we waited I could see that even his waiting-room was
handsomely furnished and I knew that it must be expensive, for our
own small apartment, a little farther up-town and around the corner
from the Drive, cost quite enough, though Kennedy insisted on
keeping it because it was so close to the university where he had his
laboratory and his class work.
As Lathrop flung the door to his inner office open I saw that he was
a tall and commanding-looking man with a Vandyke beard. One
would instinctively have picked him out anywhere as a physician.
Lathrop, I knew, was not only well known as a specialist in nervous
diseases, but also as a man about town. In spite of his large and
lucrative practice, he always seemed to have time enough to visit
the many clubs to which he belonged and to hold a prominent place
in the social life of the city.
Not only was he well known as a club-man, but he was very popular
with the ladies. In fact, it was probably due to the very life that he
led that his practice as a physician to the many ills of society had
grown.
"I suppose you know of the suicide of Vail Wilford?" asked Kennedy,
as he explained briefly, without telling too much, our connection with
the case.
Doctor Lathrop signified that he did know, but, like Shattuck, I could
see that he was inclined to be cautious about it.
"I've just been talking to Honora Wilford," went on Craig, when we
were settled in the doctor's inner office. "I believe she was a patient
of yours?"
"Yes," he admitted, with some reluctance.
"And that she had been greatly troubled by nervousness—insomnia
—her dreams—and that sort of thing."
The doctor nodded, but did not volunteer any information. However,
his was not the hostility of Shattuck. I set it down to professional
reticence and, as such, perhaps hard to overcome.
"I understand, also," pursued Kennedy, affecting not to notice
anything lacking in the readiness of the answer, "that Vance
Shattuck was friendly with her."
The doctor looked at him a moment, as though studying him.
"What do you mean?" he asked, evasively. "What makes you say
that?"
"But he was, wasn't he? At least, she was friendly with him?"
Kennedy repeated, reversing the form of the question to see what
effect it might have.
"I shouldn't say so," returned the doctor, slowly, though not frankly.
Kennedy reached into his pocket and drew forth the sonnet which he
had taken from Doyle back at the Wilford apartment.
"You will recognize the handwriting in that notation on the margin,"
he remarked, quietly. "It is Mrs. Wilford's. Her sentiment, taken from
the poem, is interesting."
Lathrop read it and then reread it to gain time, for it was some
moments before he could look up, as though he had to make up his
mind just what to say.
"Very pretty thought." He nodded, scarcely committing himself.
Lathrop seemed a trifle uneasy.
"I thought it a rather strange coincidence, taken with the bit I
learned of her dreams," remarked Kennedy.
Lathrop's glance at Kennedy was one of estimation, but I saw that
Kennedy was carefully concealing just how much, or rather at
present how little, he actually knew.
"Ordinarily," remarked Lathrop, clearing his throat, "professional
ethics would seal my lips, but in this instance, since you seem to
think that you know so much, I will tell you—something. I don't like
to talk about my patients, and I won't, but, in justice to Mrs. Wilford,
I cannot let this pass."
He cleared his throat again and leaned back in his chair, regarding
Kennedy watchfully through his glasses as he spoke.
"Some time ago," he resumed, slowly, "Mrs. Wilford came to me to
be treated. She said that she suffered from sleeplessness—and then
when she slept that her rest was broken by such horrible fantasies."
Kennedy nodded, as though fully conversant already with what the
doctor had said.
"There were dreams of her husband," he continued, "morbid fears.
One very frequent dream was of him engaged in what seemed to be
a terrific struggle, although she has never been able to tell me just
with what or whom he seemed to struggle. She told me she always
had a feeling of powerlessness when in that dream, as though
unable to run to him and help him. Then there were other dreams
that she had, especially the dreams of a funeral procession, and
always in the coffin she saw his face."
Kennedy nodded again. "Yes, I know of those dreams," he
remarked, casually. "And of some others."
For a moment Kennedy's manner seemed to take the doctor off his
professional guard—or did he intend it to seem so?
"Only the other day," Lathrop went on, a moment later, "she told me
of another dream. In it she seemed to be attacked by a bull. She
fled from it, but as it pursued her it seemed to gain on her, and she
said she could even feel its hot breath—it was so close. Then, in her
dream, in fright, as she ran over the field, hoping to gain a clump of
woods, she stumbled and almost fell. She caught herself and ran on.
She expected momentarily to be gored by the bull, but, strangely
enough, the dream went no farther. It changed. She seemed, she
said, to be in the midst of a crowd and in place of the bull pursuing
her was now a serpent. It crept over the ground after her and
hissed, seemed to fascinate her, and she trembled so that she could
no longer run. Her terror, by this time, was so great that she awoke.
She tells me that as often as she dreamed them she never finished
either dream."
"Very peculiar," commented Kennedy. "You have records of what she
has told you?"
"Yes. I may say that I have asked her to make a record of her
dreams, as well as other data which I thought might be of use in the
diagnosis and treatment of her nervous troubles."
"Might I see them?"
Lathrop shook his head emphatically.
"By no means. I consider that they are privileged, confidential
communications between patient and physician—not only illegal, but
absolutely unethical to divulge. There's one strange thing, though,
that I may be at liberty to add, since you know something already.
Always, she says, these animals in the dreams seemed to be
endowed with a sort of human personality. Both the bull and the
serpent seemed to have human faces."
Kennedy nodded at the surprising information. If I had expected him
to refer to the dream of Doctor Lathrop which she herself had told, I
was mistaken.
"What do you think is the trouble?" asked Kennedy, at length, quite
as though he had no idea what to make of it.
"Trouble? Nervousness, of course. I readily surmised that not the
dreams were the cause of her nervousness, but that her
nervousness was the cause of her dreams. As for the dreams, they
are perfectly simple, I think you will agree. Her nervousness brought
back into her recollection something that had once worried her. By
careful questioning I think I discovered what was back of her
dreams, at least in part. It's nothing you won't discover soon, if you
haven't already discovered it. It was an engagement broken before
her marriage to Wilford."
"I see," nodded Kennedy.
"In the dreams, you remember, she saw a half-human face on the
animals. It was the face of Vance Shattuck."
"I gathered as much," prompted Kennedy.
"It seems that she was once engaged to him—that she broke the
engagement because of reports she heard about his escapades. I do
not say this to disparage Mr. Shattuck. Far from that. He is a fine
fellow—an intimate friend of mine, fellow-clubmate, and all that sort
of thing. That was all before he made his trips abroad—hunting,
mostly, everywhere from the Arctic to Africa. The fact of the matter
is, as I happen to know, that since he traveled abroad he has greatly
settled down in his habits. And then, who of us has not sown his
wild oats?"
The doctor smiled indulgently at the easy-going doctrine that is now
so rapidly passing, especially among medical men.
"Well," he concluded, "that is the story. Make the most of it you
can."
"Very strange—very," remarked Kennedy, then, changing the angle
of the subject, asked, "You are acquainted with the recent work and
the rather remarkable dream theories of Doctor Freud?"
Doctor Lathrop nodded. "Yes," he replied, slowly, "I am acquainted
with them—and I dissent vigorously from most of Freud's
conclusions."
Kennedy was about to reply to this rather sweeping categorical
manner of settling the question, when, as we talked, it became
evident that there was some one just outside the partly open doors
of the inner office. I had seen a woman anxiously hovering about,
but had said nothing.
"Is that you, Vina?" called Doctor Lathrop, also catching sight of her
in the hall.
"Yes," she replied, parting the portières and nodding to us. "I beg
pardon for interrupting. I was waiting for you to get through, Irvin,
but I've an appointment down-town. I'm sure you won't mind?"
Vina Lathrop was indeed a striking woman; dark of hair, perhaps a
bit artificial, but of the sort which is the more fascinating to study
just because of that artificiality; perhaps not the type of woman
most men might think of marrying, but one whom few would fail to
be interested in. She seemed to be more of a man's woman than a
woman's woman.
"You will excuse me a moment?" begged the doctor, rising. "So, you
see," he finished with us, "when you asked me whether she was
friendly with Shattuck, it is quite the opposite, I should—"
"You're talking of Honora?" interrupted the doctor's wife.
Doctor Lathrop introduced us, as there seemed to be nothing else to
do, but I do not think he was quite at ease.
"I don't think I would have said that," she hastened, almost
ignoring, except by an inclination of the head, the introduction in the
eagerness to express an idea his words had suggested. "I don't think
Honora is capable of either deep love or even deep hate."
"A sort of marble woman?" suggested the doctor, at first biting his
lips at having her in the conversation, then affecting to be amused,
as though at one woman's spontaneous estimate of another.
Vina shrugged her prettily rounded shoulders, but said no more on
the subject.
"I sha'n't be gone long," she nodded back. "Just a bit of business."
She was gone before the doctor could say a word. Had the remark in
some way been a shot at the doctor? All did not appear to be as
serene between this couple as they might outwardly have us believe.
I saw that the interruption had not been lost on Kennedy. Had it
been really an interest in our visit that had prompted it? Somehow, I
wondered whether it might not have been this woman who had
called up Shattuck while we were there. But why?
We left the doctor a few minutes later, more than ever convinced
that the mystery in the strange death of Vail Wilford was not so
simple as it seemed.
 III
THE FREUD THEORY

"U
ntil I receive those materials from Doctor Leslie to make the
poison tests," considered Kennedy, as we walked slowly the
few blocks to the laboratory, "I can't see that there is much I
can do but wait."
In his laboratory, he paused before his well-stocked shelves with
their miscellaneous collection of books on almost every conceivable
subject.
Absently he selected a volume. I could see that it was one of the
latest translated treatises on this new psychology from the pen of
the eminent scientist, Dr. Sigmund Freud, and that it bore the
significant title, The Interpretation of Dreams.
Craig glanced through it mechanically, then laid it aside. For a few
moments he sat at his desk, hunched forward, staring straight ahead
and drumming his fingers thoughtfully. I leaned over and my eye
happened to fall on the following paragraphs:
"To him who is tortured by physical and mental
sufferings the dream accords what has been denied
him by reality, to wit, physical well-being and
happiness; so the insane, too, see the bright pictures
of happiness, greatness, sublimity, and riches. The
supposed possession of estates and the imaginary
fulfilment of wishes, the denial or destruction of which
has just served as the psychic cause of the insanity,
often form the main content of the delirium. The
woman who has lost a dearly beloved child, in her
delirium experiences maternal joys; the man who has
suffered reverses of fortune sees himself immensely
 wealthy, and the jilted girl pictures herself in the bliss
of tender love."
The above passage from Radestock reveals with the
greatest clearness the wish-fulfilment as a
characteristic of the imagination, common to the
dream and the psychosis.
It is easy to show that the character of wish-fulfilment
in dreams is often undisguised and recognizable, so
that one may wonder why the language of dreams has
not long since been understood.
I read this and more, but, as I merely skimmed it, I could not say
that I understood it. I turned to Kennedy, still abstracted.
"Then you really regard the dreams as important?" I asked, all
thought of finishing my own article on art abandoned for the present
in the fascination of the mysterious possibilities opened up by the
Wilford case.
"Important?" he repeated. "Immensely so—indispensable, as a
matter of fact."
I could only stare at him. The mere thought that anything so
freakish, so uncontrollable as a dream might have a serious
importance in a murder case had never entered my mind.
"If I can get at the truth of the case," he explained, "it must be
through these dreams."
"But how are you going to do that?" I asked, voicing the thought
that had been forming. "To me, dreams seem to be just
disconnected phantasmagoria of ideas—arising nowhere and getting
nowhere, as far as I can see—interesting, perhaps, but—still, well,
just chaotic."
"Quite the contrary, Walter," he corrected. "If you had kept abreast
with the best recent work in psychology, you wouldn't say that."
"Well, what is this wonderful Freud theory, anyhow?" I asked, a bit
nettled at his positive tone. "What do we know now that we didn't
know before?"
"Very much," he replied, thoughtfully. "There's just this to be said
about dreams to-day. A few years ago they were all but inexplicable.
The accepted explanations, then, were positively misleading and
productive of all sorts of misapprehension and downright
charlatanry."
"All right," I argued. "That's just my idea of dreams. Tell me what it
is that the modern dream-books have to say about them, then."
"Don't be frivolous, Walter," Craig frowned. "Dreams used to be
treated very seriously, it is true, by the ancients. But, as I just said,
until recently modern scientists, rejecting the beliefs of the dark
ages, as they thought, scouted dreams as senseless jumbles of
ideas, uncontrolled, in sleep. That's your class, Walter," he replied,
witheringly, "with the scientists who thought that they had the last
word, just because it was, to them, the latest."
Though I resented his correction, I said nothing, for I saw that he
was serious. Mindful of many previous encounters with Craig in his
own fields in which I had come off a bad second, I waited prudently.
"To-day, however," he continued, "we study dreams really
scientifically. We believe that whatever is has a reason. Many
students had had the idea that dreams meant something in mental
life that was not just pure fake and nonsense. But until Freud came
along with his theories little progress had been made in the scientific
study of dreams."
"Granted," I replied, now rather interested. "Then what is his
theory?"
"Not very difficult to explain, if you will listen carefully a moment,"
Craig went on. "Dreams, says Freud, are very important, instead of
being mere nonsense. They give us the most reliable information
concerning the individual. But that is possible only if the patient is in
entire rapport with the investigator. Later, I may be able to give you
a demonstration of what I mean by that. Now, however, I want you
to understand just what it is that I am seeking to discover and the
method it is my purpose to adopt to attain it."
The farther Kennedy proceeded, the more I found myself interested,
in spite of my assumption of skepticism. In fact, I had assumed the
part more because I wanted to learn from him than for any other
reason.
"But how do you think dreams arise in the first place?" I asked, more
sympathetically. "Surely, if they have a meaning that can be
discovered by a scientist like yourself, they must come in some
logical way—and that is the thing I can't understand, first of all."
"Not so difficult. The dream is not an absurd and senseless jumble,
as you seem to think. Really, when it is properly understood, it is a
perfect mechanism and has definite meaning in penetrating the
mind."
He was drawing thoughtfully on a piece of paper, as he often did
when his mind was working actively.
"It is as though we had two streams of thought," he explained, "one
of which we allow to flow freely, the other of which we are
constantly repressing, pushing back into the subconscious or the
unconscious, as you will. This matter of the evolution of our
individual mental life is much too long a story for me to go into just
at present.
"But the resistances, as they are called, the psychic censors of our
ideas, so to speak, are always active, except in sleep. It is then that
the repressed material comes to the surface. Yet these resistances
never entirely lose their power. The dream, therefore, shows the
material distorted.
"Seldom does one recognize his own repressed thoughts or
unattained wishes. The dream is really the guardian of sleep, to
satisfy the activity of the unconscious and repressed mental
processes that would otherwise disturb sleep by keeping the censor
busy. That's why we don't recognize the distortions. In the case of a
nightmare the watchman, or censor, is aroused, finds himself over-
powered, as it were, and calls for help. Consciousness must often
come to the rescue—and we wake up."
"Very neat," I admitted, now more than half convinced. "But what
sort of dreams are there? I don't see how you can classify them,
study them."
"Easily enough. I should say that there are three kinds of dreams—
those which represent an unrepressed wish as fulfilled, those that
represent the realization of a repressed wish in an entirely concealed
form, and those that represent the realization of a repressed wish,
but in a form insufficiently or only partially concealed."
"But what about these dream doctors who profess to be able to tell
you what is going to happen—the clairvoyants?"
Kennedy shrugged. "Cruel fakers, almost invariably," he replied.
"This is something entirely different, on an entirely different plane.
Dreams are not really of the future, even though they may seem to
be. They are of the past—that is, their roots are in the past. Of
course, they are of the future in the sense that they show striving
after unfulfilled wishes. Whatever may be denied in reality, we can
nevertheless realize in another way—in our dreams. It's a rather
pretty thought."
He paused a moment. "Perhaps the dream doctors were not so
fundamentally wrong as we think, even about the future," he added,
thoughtfully, "though for a different reason than they thought and a
natural one. Probably more of our daily life, conduct, moods, beliefs,
than we think could be traced to preceding dreams."
I began vaguely now to see what he was driving at and to feel the
fascination of the idea.
"Then you think that you will be able to find out from Mrs. Wilford's
dreams more than she'll ever tell you or any one else about the
case?"
"Exactly."
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