1
Bringing the Dead to Life – Animation and the Horrific
Dr Steven Allen
In spite of, or perhaps because the animated film has been seen as a
predominantly children’s genre, animation and fear are almost inextricably
linked for most people that have grown up with Disney films of the 1930s
and 40s. Although noted for their saccharine characterisations and the ‘they
all lived happily ever after endings’, they dealt with such traumatic themes as
would-be infanticide (Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, 1937) and
witnessing the death of parent (Bambi, 1942). The short animation, or
cartoon, has often exploited an even more Gothic sense of terror, for example
MGM’s Bottles of 1936 featured a pharmacist falling asleep in his
apothecary, where his potions come to life and he is pursued by spirits of
ammonia. Such films are the antecedents of the texts I wish to discuss in this
paper. Corpse Bride from 2005 and Monster House of 2006, reinterpret
Gothic terror in relation to marriage and gender. Alongside an exploration of
these twin elements of the narrative, I will focus on how a nostalgic display
of genre conventions produces a surprising complement to the sophisticated
animation techniques foregrounded in both films. In combination, an
uncanny space is generated within which the two films interrogate the fear of
losing a loved one, and the possibility of overcoming that fear.
Uncanny aesthetic
With Corpse Bride, Tim Burton directs a tale of Victor, a shy groom,
mistakenly marrying a dead woman when he practises his wedding vows on
the eve of his big day, and places the ring on what he thinks is a branch, but
is in fact a corpse bride’s skeletal finger. The central thrust of the narrative is
that the corpse bride, Emily, was murdered on the eve of her wedding by her
fiancé, and although falling in love with Victor, sacrifices herself to enable
him to attain the love she was denied. Crucial to the look of the film is the
use of stop-motion animation – a form of filmmaking with its horror ancestry
closely linked to the 1930s’ version of King Kong (1933) – and which relies
on manipulating puppets by small increments between each shot. Although
reviews such as Peter Whittle’s in the Sunday Times referred to it as an ‘oldfashioned’ technique,1 the project was also noted for its technical
innovations, including sophisticated mechanics within the puppets to enable
subtle facial expressions and movements, and the application of much
smaller digital cameras to get closer to the figures. The characters therefore
register as inanimate puppets, but take on a more expressive, life-like form.
Consequently, although traditional, the film was simultaneously seen as
inventively new.
2
The film’s aesthetic was far more traditional though, borrowing greatly
from generic conventions of both the Gothic novel and horror cinema. Mostly
set at night, disquieting spaces are established in both the wood and a church,
whilst the dead eerily come to life, but with the underworld more colourful
and alive than the grey-hued, moralistic land of the living. It is a
phantasmagoric space.
Monster House, although featuring a far less Gothic aesthetic, relies on
the generic trope of a haunted house for its fear. All the local children are
terrified of old Mr Nebbercracker, but the threat is not him, it is his house.
Three school children, tellingly on the verge of puberty, discover that the
building is infused with the presence of Mr Nebbercracker’s dead wife,
Constance, an entity he is afraid of losing even though he is terrified the
anthropomorphic home will devour the neighbourhood children. The film
used the same performance-capture technology as The Polar Express (2004),
whereby human actors are recorded and then traced via digital postproduction animation. The technique provides a highly detailed style of
animation, which many reviewers saw as disconcerting. The spectator fails to
achieve the point of empathy normally experienced with animation because
the character feels not sufficiently human or inhuman. The effect was
softened in Monster House by having a greater number of imperfections and
textures, but was enhanced through modelling the humans as if they were
‘articulate puppets made out of high-density foam’.2 In effect, they are
humanistic puppets.
The disturbing response generated by the style of animation can be
interpreted via Freud’s conception of ‘The “uncanny”’; indeed, the visual
effect is now described as the ‘uncanny valley’. In a much cited work in
respect of the Gothic, Freud explores the meanings of heimlich (or homely)
and its converse, unheimlich, (the unhomely or uncanny), which he sees as
the opposite to what is familiar.3 However, his assertion is that ‘[t]he uncanny
is that class of frightening which leads back to what is known of old and long
familiar’.4 In other words, there is a link back to an origin or former state via
memory. The aesthetics of the two films have this combination at their core.
Although using very different styles of animation, Visual Effects
Supervisor on Monster House, Jay Redd, articulated a shared vision: ‘[w]e
wanted it to look photo-real like stop motion … like Corpse Bride. We
wanted it to feel tangible’.5 Three-dimensional detail, synthetic facial
textures, but with expressive human features, and virtuoso (virtual) camera
movements form a conglomeration of technological sophistication, but which
inherently reference an older style of animation, that is long familiar. In
effect, there is a collision and partial coalescing of old and new, which
evokes the uncanny.
3
Nostalgia
I will return to the notion of the uncanny later in my paper, but it is important
to situate this alongside the films’ application of nostalgia to explore the fear
of bereavement. Generically, the two narratives draw upon a heritage of
terror films. One example from both should suffice to demonstrate the point.
The corpse bride, Emily, features a malevolent version of Jiminy Cricket in
the form of a maggot in her head with a face and voice modelled on Peter
Lorre. A staple caricature from Warner Brothers’ cartoons of the 1930s and
40s, Lorre’s persistent filmic persona was described in a Twentieth-Century
Fox biography as Hollywood’s ‘one-man chamber of horrors’. He is
distinctive shorthand for terror.
Monster House borrows from the Gothic tradition of haunted houses as I
have mentioned, but in particular, references cinema. Charlene Bunnell
pinpoints The Shining (1980) as a key example of Gothic’s transition into
film,6 and tellingly, it too features a character, played by Jack Nicholson,
becoming part of the fabric of a building, the Overlook hotel. That we should
make such a link is made clear by the opening of Monster House, where a
young girl cycles her tricycle along the street, and the camera follows her in a
virtual Steadicam effect, just as a young boy had been followed around the
corridors of the hotel in the earlier film. These two examples illustrate how
the films, although full of humour, are situated within an appreciative
reflection on the genres of terror.
We might also note that the narratives reflect a certain idealism for
childhood, or at least, pre-adult times. In Monster House, DJ begins the film
by saying he is too old to go trick-or-treating, but at the end, he and his friend
Chowder run off dressed as pirates to do exactly that. In Corpse Bride, when
Victor travels to the underworld, his dead wife gives him a wedding present
of his old family pet – now, only a skeleton, the dog is naturally somewhat
confused when told to play dead, but still offers the comfort Victor needs.
The nostalgia in the films is therefore thematic as well as self-reflexive of
animation and the horror genre. Both films centre on the fear of letting go of
the past, and celebrate the pleasures of previous behaviour and events.
Ultimately then, the films attempt to articulate the contradiction of nostalgia:
it is a potent tool for coping with the progression of time, but also a barrier to
the necessary progression of life.
My thoughts on nostalgia are guided by Maryse Fauvel’s study of two
French films, the documentary Gleaners and I (Varda, 2000) and the
animation The Triplets of Belleville (Chomet, 2003).7 As with Corpse Bride
and Monster House, these films foreground technology in a reflexive manner,
notably in terms of digital techniques and equipment, but whilst Fauvel
positions it in respect of an ironic tension with nostalgia, my focus is on how
the combination functions within an overarching portrayal of the uncanny.
Furthermore, where Fauvel sees the past being recalled in her films, but
4
ultimately nostalgia is rejected in a process of recycled renewal, Corpse
Bride and Monster House utilise nostalgia in tandem with an exploration of
the fear of love and loss, and so celebrate its importance alongside the need
to let go. Therefore, what Fauvel sees as the ‘impossibility of indulging in
nostalgia’8 is replaced by its necessity, at least temporarily, as a means to
alleviate the pain of loss. The two films achieve this by different means
however.
In her book The Future of Nostalgia (2001), Svetlana Boym pays
particular attention to the etymology of nostalgia. The word comes from
nostos: a return home, and algia/algos: meaning pain, but also a longing.
Applying these twin components, Boym distinguishes between restorative
and reflective nostalgias.
Restorative nostalgia puts emphasis on nostos and proposes to
rebuild the lost home and patch up the memory gaps.
Reflective nostalgia dwells in algia, in longing and loss, the
imperfect process of remembrance. […] Restorative nostalgia
manifests itself in total reconstructions of monuments of the
past, while reflective nostalgia lingers on ruins, the patina of
time and history, in the dreams of another place and another
time.9
Although some overlap, it is not difficult to distinguish between my two
films along these lines. Monster House quite literally features the rebuilding
of a lost home. Transmogrified into the domestic embodiment of Constance,
the house takes on the countenance of a human as it attempts to devour all
children that come near, but shifts back into wood, bricks and mortar when
adults appear. Deep in the cellar is a shrine, complete with concrete
sarcophagus, constructed by Nebbercracker in reverence to his accidentally
killed wife. The house is a monument to the past: an example of restorative
nostalgia. In Corpse Bride, the tone is one of reflective nostalgia. The ruins
of the film are the lives and degenerated bodies of the dead from all ages,
complete with falling off limbs, sword wounds and corpse-less heads. Above
all else, both Emily initially, and later Victor when taken to the underworld,
are dreaming of a different time and place they think of as home. That
Corpse Bride promotes a reflective nostalgia is also shown by Victor’s
reaction to his dead dog, Scraps. Initially pleased as the dog greets him, he
suddenly stops short when Scraps jumps on the bench, and Victor remembers
that his mother did not approve of that, before voicing the damning comment
that she ‘never approved of anything’. His nostalgia is tempered so that the
yearning contains a critical awareness of what was bad, and his fear of loss is
moderated. By contrast, Nebbercracker, although revealed via a flashback to
have had a tempestuous relationship with Constance, declares, in the present
5
tense, ‘I love her so much’. His emotions are shaped by a restorative
nostalgia
that
obscures
his
current
relationship
with
his
wife/house/housewife. Fear permeates their relationship, not only his fear of
losing her but also his fear of what she might do as the monster house. The
relationship of fear to nostalgia is therefore key in the depiction of
bereavement.
When Nebbercracker and the children attempt to destroy the monster
house, he suddenly has doubts and proclaims, ‘But if I let her go, I’ll have no
one’. Just as many people when faced with the death of a partner feel unable
to alter or abandon the home they shared together because it somehow
embodies the deceased, Nebbercracker earlier stated ‘the house is her’. It is
only through the promised friendship of the children that he can finally brave
letting go.
Like Nebbercracker, Emily in Corpse Bride clings to Victor when she
believes she can have the love she was denied by her murder. She attempts to
rebuild her lost life, but with Victor. However, on seeing his bride-to-be,
Victoria, Emily achieves a critical distance, and lets him go. Emily too can
now find liberation from her fear of being unmarried and left on her own. It is
in this respect that nostalgia helps one to cope with the pain of loss. Only
when it is more manageable though can it shift from restorative nostalgia to
reflective nostalgia.
That both Nebbercracker and Emily relinquish the memories of a lost
love and overcome the fear of isolation is justified by the morality of their
decision to sacrifice themselves for the collective good. But I wish to suggest
that our own insecurities do not enable this to be sufficient justification for
the narrative conclusions of separation. Like Nebbercracker and Emily, we
hope for a reconciliation with the past; we recognise the fear of losing a
partner and our need for wistful remembrance to cope with the parting. To
surmount these feelings, and allow the narrative closures to be pleasurable,
the texts are constructed so that we are obliged to read the events in a manner
that fits that most platitudinous of expressions for bereavement: ‘it’s for the
best’. Such an interpretation is achieved through mapping the monstrousness
onto marriage and in particular the female.
Marriage and gender as monster
Marriage is seen as obligation in Corpse Bride. Victoria’s aristocratic but
destitute parents, the Everglots, sing that their daughter’s marriage will
‘provide a ticket to our rightful place’. And when Victoria questions if she
might like the man in her arranged marriage, her mother answers ‘Do you
suppose your father and I like each other?’ Love becomes something to be
dreamed of, either as aspiration or nostalgia, as marriage destroys it. Or, we
might reverse that and say that the terror contained within passionate love is
discovered to be too powerful to persist, and so is curtailed by marriage.
6
Either way, whilst Victoria still has hope, Victor is shown to be confused and
fearful. At his wedding rehearsal, he ominously becomes muddled and
stumbles over whether he wishes to marry or not. He later confesses he was
‘terrified of marriage’. That marriage is a fool’s errand is confirmed by the
drunk skeleton proclaiming, ‘Women, you can’t live with them, you can’t
live with…’, before collapsing without finishing the phrase with the negative
assertion. DJ’s parents in Monster House seem more united, but he is left in
the hands of a female babysitter for the duration of the film, and she is shown
to be fixated by boyfriends, blackmailing DJ to enable her to spend time with
one. And as we have seen, the Nebbercrackers’ marriage is certainly flawed
and destructive.
That the problems emanate from female desire is also clear. I noted
earlier that the three children in Monster House are reaching puberty, and this
is joked about both by them and through the narrative. When partly devoured
by the house as the hall rug transforms into a tongue, Chowder asks what the
sack of hanging balls are in the hallway. Jenny explains it is the uvula, to
which he knowlingly replies, ‘so it’s a girl house’. Little wonder that Stephen
Brown comments that ‘[t]he image can inevitably be read as a vagina dentata
motif, the concept taken up by Freud to explain male castration anxieties’.10
That we have now located the female body and its emotions as the site of the
uncanny in the film should not be a surprise. It is a familiar feature of horror
films. And yet, the emphasis on the need for love throughout both films, and
the fear being defined in terms of being alone, disguises the reactionary
element.
Longing for love is the pain of the corpse bride; Emily poignantly
admits that although not burnt by the candle flame, her emotional suffering is
as real as those of the living. It is her desire to overcome this pain that makes
her pursue Victor and become the clinging monster that threatens Victoria’s
union with her groom. Clearly any man would do for Emily as she had no
choice in who would wake her from her death slumber, and it was her desires
that prompted her murder in the first place, as she had eloped with a man who
had only wanted her family’s money. Whether Victoria offers the same threat
is debatable. She says that she always ‘hoped to find someone I was deeply in
love with’, but she does not play music, a trope that links Victor and Emily,
and which Lady Everglot has told Victoria is ‘improper for a young lady’ as
it is ‘too passionate’. Emotional excess in a woman is thus cast as dangerous,
the point being comically reinforced by the red –back spider introducing
herself to Victor with the phrase, ‘Married huh, I’m a widow’.
The implication is that although mourning, Nebbercracker and Emily are
actually not losing very much. Nebbercracker has become a scary recluse,
who frightens the local children, only as a ruse to hide the true monstrousness
of Constance. Emily, although not so terrifying, has lain dormant alone in the
woods in the hope of rekindling a romance, but realises she must release
7
herself from such futile dreams. When letting go, both Emily and Constance
disintegrate into clouds, the former of butterflies, the latter a contented figure
in smoke. The dispersal of these forms suggests the omniscient nature we are
frequently encouraged to imagine in respect of the dead, and thus the fear of
being alone is diffused as well.
Conclusion
So what can we conclude? Monster House or Corpse Bride, both are horrific
forms of the female overcome with emotion. Nebbercracker protects
Constance by scaring off children out of duty, whilst Victor says he will still
marry Emily as he made her a promise. The men, although admitting to
emotions of fear and love, remain rational, whilst the women are still largely
defined by their emotions. Such a reactionary depiction is disappointing.
Nonetheless, in dealing with the fear of bereavement in two animated films
pitched at a family audience, we are witnessing a trend that includes Bambi,
but in a radically variant form that explores nostalgia as a means of coping
with the pain. An aesthetic that raids genre conventions is able to enhance the
feelings of longing and loss, whilst love is shown to be both desirable and
terrifying. The uncanny nature of bereavement is thus shown – we cling to
what we have lost, but know we must let go, eventually. That love is strange
and overwhelming is not new, nor that desire can terrify both us and others,
but that the horror lies not in death, but our ways of coping with it, might just
be saying something not often heard in a horror film.
1
P. Whittle, ‘Honey, I married a zombie’, Sunday Times – Culture, 23
October 2005, p. 13.
2
A. Thompson, ‘Monster House has latest FX amenities’, Entertainment
News (Reuters), 28 July 2006, viewed on 1 August 2007,
<http://www.entertainment-news.org/breaking/51975/monster-house-haslatest-fx-amenities.html>.
3
S. Freud, ‘The “Uncanny”’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete
Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. James Strachey, vol. xvii,
Hogarth Press, London, 1955, p. 220.
4
ibid., p. 220.
5
Cited in A. Thompson, op. cit.
6
C. Bunnell, ‘The Gothic: A Literary Genre’s Transition to Film’ in Planks
of Reason, ed. B. K. Grant, Scarecrow Press, Lanham, Md.; London,
1984/1996, pp.79-100.
7
M. Fauvel, ‘Nostalgia and digital technology: The Gleaners and I (Varda,
2000) and The Triplets of Belleville (Chomet, 2003) as reflective genres’,
Studies in French Cinema, 5:3, 2005.
8
Ibid., p. 219.
8
9
S. Boym, The Future of Nostalgia, Basic Books, New York, 2001, p. 41.
S. Brown ‘Monster House – Review’, Sight and Sound, 16:9, September
2006, p. 61.
10
9
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