The Poetics of Slumberland: Animated Spirits and the Animating Spirit

and#147;In praise of animation and play, The Poetics of Slumberland is what we rarely findand#151;an inspiring book exploring the elastic pleasures of the imagination.and#8221;and#151;Alexander Nemerov, author of Acting in the Night: Macbeth and the Places of the Civil War

and#147;The Poetics of Slumberland continues Scott Bukatman's fascination with the vertiginous mapping of modernity from the early twentieth century to the present, here with emphasis on the relationship of the artist/animator to his own potentially autonomous and disobedient creations, which often demand a and#145;life of their own.and#8217; Never pedantic, always vibrant, and often downright funny, Bukatman's essays range across artists, art forms, and genres in a work that is as imaginative and seriously playful as its overarching theme.and#8221;and#151;Vivian Sobchack, author of Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture

and#147;Bodies which expand and stretch through animation and special effects, within worlds subjected to topsy-turvy perspectives and kaleidoscopic optics. . . . Bukatman synthesizes a view of an American popular culture of comics, musical numbers, science fiction fantasies, Jerry Lewisand#8217;s convulsions, and superhero transcendence with considerations of the sublime, abstract expressionism, the phenomenology of the body, and avant-garde cinemaand#151;and makes us believe it! Rarely has any critic caught the pulse of American dreams so vividly and with equal parts exhilaration and vertigo."and#151;Tom Gunning, author of D. W. Griffith and the Origins of American Narrative Film: The Early Years at Biograph

and#8220;Delightfully Chestertonian. . . . Bukatman shows the marvelous animated poetics of visual media. . . . Essential.and#8221;

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 McCayand#8217;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 and#147;animatedand#8221; behaviors in seemingly disparate mediaand#151;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 superheroesand#151;drawing them all together as the purveyors of embodied utopias of disorder.

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.

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