Scott Bukatman’s The Poetics of Slumberland: Animated Spirits and the Animating Spirit appears, at first glance, to be a book about the work of pioneering cartoonist, animator, and chalk-talker Winsor McCay (1867–1934). After all, McCay’s most celebrated work—Little Nemo in Slumberland (1905–11)—is explicitly referenced in the title, and three illustrations from two distinct Little Nemo strips adorn the front and back cover. But Bukatman’s book, although organized around an extended examination of McCay’s life and work, is much more ambitious than this. For Bukatman, Slumberland is not merely a fictional nation visited by Nemo in the strip that bears his name—it is a kind of aesthetic, narrative space, characterized by plasticity, playfulness, and parody:

For the purposes of this book Slumberland is more than just a marvelous world for Nemo and its other citizens; it is an aesthetic space primarily defined through the artist’s innovations, an animated space that opens out to embrace the imaginative sensibility of a reader who is never farther than an arm’s length from this other realm, a space of play and plasmatic possibility in which the stable site of reading or viewing yields to an onslaught of imaginative fantasy; and it is an impermanent space. (1)

Thus, a Slumberland can appear almost anywhere, from Eadweard Muybridge’s photographic motion studies, to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), to Grant Morrison’s comic book Animal Man (1988–90).

The usage of the term “animated/animating” in the title is equally nuanced and ambiguous: Bukatman is of course interested in the art form—projected hand-drawn or computer-generated images imitating continuous motion—and in particular in McCay’s Gertie the Dinosaur (1914) and the film version of Little Nemo (1911). But the term, as used in the title, has a wider sense that is important to Bukatman’s project, and the introduction to The Poetics of Slumberland presents a detailed explication of this multifaceted notion of animation based on three central ideas that frame and focus the chapters that follow.

First, there is the notion that comics and animated films (as well as the other comics- and animation-like works considered later in the book) play out a tension between “regulation” (characters and plot following a course preordained by creators) and “resistance” (characters and plot rebelling—or, at least, being portrayed as if rebelling—against this control). Second, there is a sense that the works in question are intimately involved in “play”: a sense of prankishness, frivolity, or “swarming” and “an interlude, an intermezzo, from the normative behaviors of everyday life” (11). Finally, these works demonstrate a central concern with “energy.” This energy goes beyond merely depicting the characters as alive—in addition, they morph and stretch, defying the laws of physics and instantiating a plasmatic and animistic vitality and freedom. Although Bukatman’s introduction, like much of the rest of the book, centers on examples taken from McCay’s oeuvre, it is perhaps his description of Chuck Jones’s Duck Amuck (1953) that best illustrates what he has in mind:

Take the less ethnically obvious Daffy Duck. He is animated: as in mobile, kinetic. He is animated: as in, a series of static drawings imbued with motion by a labor-intensive mode of production and the cinematic apparatus. He is animated: as in, overanimated, annoying, irritating (other ugly feelings). He is a profoundly self-conscious, exaggeratedly performative character continuously doing battle with other characters, with the genre conventions of the parodies he performs, with the head of his studio, and, most memorably, with the animator himself. (21; emphasis in original)

This passage, although extremely helpful in understanding the various senses of “animated” that are of interest to Bukatman, also highlights one (of a very, very few) of the disappointments of the book—the discussion of the connection between animation, race, and ethnicity. Bukatman, borrowing from his Stanford colleague Sianne Ngai’s Ugly Feelings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), notes that the animated character, in this broad sense of animation, is, in virtue of being the exaggerated or irritating other, often the target of “ugly feelings.” In other words, animation and the animated are racialized (or ethnicized). Bukatman mentions this idea in passing numerous times throughout the book: John Updike’s interpretation of Mickey Mouse as African American (21), the racialized depictions of Little Nemo’s sidekicks Impy and Flip (134), the ethnic/racial mutability of shape-shifting comic book characters such as the X-Men’s Mystique (203), and the Jewishness of both Jerry Lewis (155) and Superman creators Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster (210). Unfortunately, this discussion never develops into more than quick observations or citations of Ngai’s (excellent) study. Given the rather complex and contentious history of race and ethnicity in comics and animation (both in the images and in the studios in which they were produced), a closer examination of these issues would have been welcome.

The six chapters that follow each present one or more case studies, using them to investigate more deeply the themes outlined in the introduction. Chapter 1, “Drawn and Disorderly,” provides a close reading of both Muybridge’s motion studies and McCay’s Dreams of the Rarebit Fiend (1904–11) comic, examining how motion, regulation, and resistance feature in an understanding of these works. Bukatman argues that Dreams of the Rarebit Fiend (and comics from this era more generally) are parodic commentaries on the stresses of “real” life, enacting the resistance that is so central to his understanding of animation. Chapter 2, “The Motionless Voyage of Little Nemo,” is concerned with the participatory and plastic nature of the animated—that is, on the malleability, mobility, and mutability of both characters themselves and their relation to the reader—and, as the title suggests, focuses for the most part on the dream-strip referenced in the title of the book. Chapter 3, “Labor and Anima,” examines the way in which life is transferred from the animator to the animated (often figuratively or metaphorically, sometimes literally) via the “hand of the artist.” Here Bukatman mobilizes a surprisingly effective comparison of the roles played by production and performance in McCay’s Little Nemo short film and Henri-Georges Clouzot’s 1956 film Le mystère Picasso, examining how both works simultaneously mystify and demystify creation (and hence animation). Chapter 4, “Disobedient Machines,” continues to probe the transfer of anima from creator to created (and also features a strong focus on the resistance of the animated), but here the target is Pygmalionesque narratives in media other than comics and cinematic animation. The discussion of stories involving creators who are betrayed by their creations is wide-ranging, including Shelley’s Frankenstein, Carlo Collodi’s The Adventures of Pinocchio (1883), George Cukor’s My Fair Lady (1964), and Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982). Most interesting, however, is Bukatman’s extended discussion of Jerry Lewis’s Artists and Models (1955) where he suggests that Lewis himself is the created, malfunctioning form come to life. Chapter 5, “Labor and Animatedness,” examines the transfer of life from artist/worker to art/work, focusing on Vincente Minnelli’s 1954 Vincent van Gogh biopic Lust for Life and on the actual lives of twentieth-century American action painters (especially Jackson Pollock).

These first five chapters are a nearly faultless examination of the notion of animatedness, and of the connections between animation (in Bukatman’s broad sense) and resistance, plasmaticity, self-referentiality, and play in twentieth-century narrative and art. Bukatman falters a bit, however, in the final chapter, “Playing Superheroes.” There is no doubt that Superman is deeply involved with the participatory, the plasmatic, the resistant, and the fantastic. As an alien orphaned on a strange world (our own), he is perhaps more concerned with these themes than most superheroes, even: for Superman, the Earth is a mysterious Slumberland. Nevertheless, Bukatman never seems comfortable with the idea that Superman, or the superhero generally, is deserving of the same seriousness that he brought to bear in his examinations of the more respectable works studied in earlier chapters. After a lengthy justification for addressing superhero comics in the first place (182–90), Bukatman focuses on two issues.

First, he argues that superhero films heavily dependent on computer-generated imagery (CGI) are inferior to superhero comics since the former involve a “rupture” between the live-action (non-super) actual body and the computer-generated (that is: animated) super, yet merely simulated, non-body. According to Bukatman the plasmatic nature of comics is fractured in twenty-first-century cinematic adaptations of superhero comics. Bukatman’s discussion, while interesting and insightful, oversimplifies the matter: arguably, there is no genuine rupture here, since the sharp line that Bukatman hypothesizes between, for example, the supposedly unmediated images of Peter Parker caring for his Aunt May and the computer-generated scenes of Spiderman swinging between Manhattan skyscrapers, is itself an illusion: every image on the screen in the twenty-first century is digital, and the content of such images is always produced, manipulated, and delivered by digital technologies (furthermore, CGI effects often involve underlying live-action motion-capture technologies). The difference, if any, is a matter of the extent of such image manipulation and generation, not the mere presence of such. As a result, if superhero films sever “the connection between the inexpressive body and the liberated, expressive one” (203), they do so only in a sense in which all digital media (and hence all digital films) do so.

The second issue is an extended discussion of British comics writer Grant Morrison, focusing on his work for DC Comics and what is arguably his masterpiece: All-Star Superman (2006–8), a collaboration with artist Frank Quitely. Bukatman carefully traces the shifts, jumps, breaks, and blurs that Morrison inserts between multiple, multiply participatory “worlds” involved in the production and consumption of superhero comics: the world of the reader (which Morrison’s characters sometimes enter), the world of the creator (also available, on occasion, to characters in the fiction), the world of the superhero herself or himself (quite often visited by Morrison in the guise of a “fiction suit”), the worlds of the fictions consumed by the superheroes (which can again be accessed by Morrison’s superheroes and vice versa), and so on. Unfortunately, Bukatman does not take Morrison’s own book-length commentary on these issues into account, writing in an endnote that “Morrison’s often intriguing memoir-meditation appeared as I was completing the writing of this book and so receives less attention than it deserves” (236n6). The intricacies of Morrison’s extremely complex, multi-level metaphysics of the fictional-versus-real are certainly worthy of extended critical attention, but Bukatman’s examination often merely recapitulates, and at times suffers in comparison to, Morrison’s own analysis in Supergods: What Masked Vigilantes, Miraculous Mutants, and a Sun God from Smallville Can Teach Us About Being Human (New York: Spiegel and Grau, 2011). But perhaps this is actually a blessing in disguise; at least Bukatman, unlike Morrison, does not defend his analysis based on insights gleaned from a drug-fueled conversation with aliens from the fifth dimension—the authors of our reality/fiction (Supergods, 276–77).

Despite these minor missteps, The Poetics of Slumberland is 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.