The Poetics of Slumberland: Animated Spirits and the Animating Spirit

by Scott Bukatman

Overview

In The Poetics of Slumberland, Scott Bukatman celebrates play, plasmatic possibility, and the life of images in cartoons, comics, and cinema. Bukatman begins with Winsor McCay’s Little Nemo in Slumberland to explore how and why the emerging media of comics and cartoons brilliantly captured a playful, rebellious energy characterized by hyperbolic emotion, physicality, and imagination. The book broadens to consider similar “animated” behaviors in seemingly disparate media—films about Jackson Pollock, Pablo Picasso, and Vincent van Gogh; the musical My Fair Lady and the story of Frankenstein; the slapstick comedies of Jerry Lewis; and contemporary comic superheroes—drawing them all together as the purveyors of embodied utopias of disorder.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780520265721
Publisher:	University of California Press
Publication date:	03/26/2012
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	286
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Scott Bukatman is Professor of Film and Media Studies at Stanford University. He is the author of many books, including Terminal Identity and, most recently, Matters of Gravity: Special Effects and Supermen in the Twentieth Century.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations
Appreciations

Introduction: The Lively, the Playful, and the Animated
1. Drawn and Disorderly
2. The Motionless Voyage of Little Nemo
3. Labor and Anima
4. Disobedient Machines
5. Labor and Animatedness
6. Playing Superheroes

Notes
Bibliography
Index

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"Delightfully Chestertonian. . . . Bukatman shows the marvelous animated poetics of visual media. . . . Essential."—Choice

Editorial Reviews

Delightfully Chestertonian. . . . Bukatman shows the marvelous animated poetics of visual media. . . . Essential.

Choice - T. Lindvall

"...an exceptional analysis of the nature of the animated and the animating (in the broadest sense of these terms) as they arise in twentieth- (and twenty-first-) century narrative media. Anyone who is interested in comics and animation, or in the role played by notions of life, energy, and plasticity in art more generally, will find much that is useful, novel, and insightful in Bukatman’s study."

caa.reviews - Roy T. Cook

"Thanks to Bukatman’s prose (a blend of rich textual analysis, a deft knowledge of theories ranging from play to phenomenology, and humour—here is a book about comics that is often comical!)—and a beautiful collection of colour and black and white reproductions of comic and film art, our scholarly community now benefits from an elaboration of both the practice of comic book consumption and the ties that bind American comics and animation."

Studies in Comics - Drew Morton