Tim Burton is an internationally celebrated director, critically acclaimed for his fantasy horror films and the macabre ghosts, animated corpses and grotesques that inhabit them. This innovative study centres on the body as a centripetal force in Burton’s work and considers the array of anomalous, extraordinary and transgressive beings that pervade his canon. It broadens the focus of living forms to include animated, creaturely, corporeal and Gothic bodies, exploring the way that Burton celebrates the body – whether human, animal, animated or anthropomorphised.

In prioritising the somatic aspects of characters, Tim Burton’s Bodies spotlights actual physical attributes and behaviour, and considers what meanings these may impart in terms of race, class, gender, sexuality, humanimality and disability.