Episode 51 - Beetlejuice (Tim Burton, 1988) (with Jingan Young)

Beetlejuice (Tim Burton, 1988).

The Fantasy/Animation podcast takes listeners on a journey through the intersection between fantasy cinema and the medium of animation. Available via Apple Podcasts, Spotify and many of your favourite podcast hosting platforms!

Episode 51 travels back to the late-1980s to look closely at Beetlejuice (Tim Burton, 1988), a film that uses stop-motion, practical effects, prosthetics, make-up and bluescreen to complete its fantasy story of netherworlds, outsiderdom and life after death. Joining Chris and Alex is special guest Jingan Young, playwright, screenwriter, journalist and academic who is the editor of ‘Foreign Goods’ (the first collection of British Chinese plays published in the UK) and a regular contributor to The Guardian and Hong Kong Free Press, who has recently completed a PhD in Film Studies at King’s College London. Listen as they discuss the tonally abrasive qualities of Tim Burton’s film and its shifts into haunted house horror; narratives of conquest, and how this connects to Beetlejuice’s take on white privilege and U.S. national identity; Michael Keaton’s performance and the figure of the trickster; the racialised use of music and questions of neo-minstrelsy; and how the film’s satirical-political edge gives the animated fantasy a bit of extra bite.

Suggested Readings

• Brian Attebery, The Fantasy Tradition in American Literature (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1980).

• Philip Brophy, “The Animation of Sound,” available at: http://www.philipbrophy.com/projects/chapters/animationofsound/chapter.html.

• Johnson Cheu, Diversity in Disney Films: Critical Essays on Race, Ethnicity, Gender, Sexuality and Disability (North Carolina: McFarland & Company Inc., Publishers, 2013).

• Ronald S. Magliozzi and Jenny He, Tim Burton (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2009).

• Alison McMahan, The Films of Tim Burton: Animating Live Action in Contemporary Hollywood (New York and London: Continuum, 2006).

• Laura Mulvey, “A Clumsy Sublime,” Film Quarterly 60, no. 3 (Spring 2007): 3.

• Sianne Ngai, ““A Foul Lump Started Making Promises in My Voice:” Race, Affect, and the Animated Subject,” American Literature 74, no. 3 (September

  2002): 571–601

• Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings (Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2005), 89-125.