The Poetics of Slumberland: Animated Spirits and the Animating Spirit

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 McCay'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 "animated" behaviors in seemingly disparate media-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 superheroes-drawing them all together as the purveyors of embodied utopias of disorder.