CFP Gothic Imagination of Walt Disney Studios (2/12/2024)

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The Gothic Imagination of Walt Disney Studios: Fear, Horror and the Uncanny in the ‘Happiest Place on Earth’

deadline for submissions: February 12, 2024

full name / name of organization: Diana Sandars / University of Melbourne

contact email: sandars@unimelb.edu.au

source: https://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2023/12/14/the-gothic-imagination-of-walt-disney-studios-fear-horror-and-the-uncanny-in-the-

“The Gothic Imagination of Walt Disney Studios: Fear, Horror and the Uncanny in the ‘Happiest Place on Earth’.”

Editors A/Prof Allison Craven (James Cook University, Australia) and Dr Diana Sandars (University of Melbourne)

Since the 1920s, in its animated and live-action media, Walt Disney Studios has imagined dark, fearful, and horrifying characters and scenarios amidst the legendary hype of Disneyland as the ‘happiest place on earth’. While a disparate critical literature exists exploring Disney’s darkness (for instance, see Nelson; Allan; Whitley; Philips; Piatti-Farnell), this special issue seeks to examine its potential as a purveyor of Gothic. If the early cinema adapted nineteenth-century Gothic conventions in ways that are largely unchanged (Elferen), Disney’s animated films are among the earliest and most striking examples. Skeleton Dance (1929, among the Silly Symphonies) is a prototype - set in a graveyard, and combining imagery from Gothic melodrama and humour from vaudeville (Piatti-Farnell 2019) - while German Expressionist influences and the growing cultural interest in horror (Allan) became fully fledged in feature animation with the evil Queen in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937). Many Disney productions since are replete with princesses in Gothic castles (Piatti Farnell) in various states of ruin (see Ross; Swann), or dive into uncanny oceans and submarine worlds (Sandars), or Gothicise quasi-historical dramas, or encompass all range of magical households,Hoffmanesque fantasies, Radcliffian forest dalliances, and the more-than-human sublime. While critique of “Disneyfication” of fairy tales is extensive (Schickel; Zipes), the “Disneyfication” of horror and Gothic in these productions, as well as its theme parks and merchandise, remains under-recognised and under-researched.

We invite papers probing Disney(fication of) Gothic from a range of perspectives to consider its effects, aesthetic and material. Where and when, for instance, do Disney’s practices of adaptation and self-homage (Cecire) impact the Gothic canon? How do iconic creatives like Tim Burton influence Disney Gothic? Where does Disney’s grotesquerie sit within the transgressive range of “body Gothic” (Reyes) in horror literature and film? How do Goth(ic) paratexts of iconic characters in fan cultures disrupt Disney’s branding? How does Disney’s comic horror - from Skeleton Dance to Hotel Transylvania - align with Catherine Spooner’s (2017) notion of ‘happy Gothic’? When are these imaginings merely Disney-esque, and when do they speak to the hauntedness of the human condition? Can the ‘happiest place on earth’, with its ideological penchant for ‘happy endings’ (Craven; Piatti-Farnell 2018), really perpetuate or expand the ‘Gothic imagination’?

We seek abstracts of 250-300 words (plus 50-word author biographies) outlining proposed essays of 6500 words (including notes and references). Send to Allison Craven (allison.craven@jcu.edu.au); or Diana Sandars (sandars@unimelb.edu.au) by 12 February 2024.

 

Works Cited 

Allan, Robin. “European Influences on Early Disney Feature Films.” In A Reader In Animation Studies, edited by Jayne Pilling. Indiana University Press, 1997. pp 241- 60.  

Cecire, Maria Sachiko, “Reality Remixed: Neomedieval Princess Culture in Disney’s Enchanted,” in The Disney Middle Ages: A Fairy-tale and Fantasy Past, edited by Tison Pugh & Susan Aronstein. Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. p243 - 259

Craven, Allison. Fairy Tale Interrupted: Feminisms, Masculinities and Wonder Cinema. Peter Lang, 2017.

Elferen, Isabella Van. Gothic Music: The Sounds of the Uncanny, University of Wales Press, 2012.  

Nelson, Thomas A. “Darkness in the Disney Look.” Literature/Film Quarterly, vol. 6, no. 2, 1978, pp. 94–103. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/43795664.  

Philips, Deborah. Fairground Attractions: a Genealogy of the Pleasure Ground. Bloomsbury, 2012.

Piatti-Farnell, Lorna, ed. Gothic Afterlives: Reincarnations of Horror in Film and Popular Media. Lexington Books, 2019. 

Piatti-Farnell, “Blood Flows Freely: The Horror of Classic Fairy Tales.” In The Palgrave Handbook to Horror Literature, edited by Kevin Corstorphine & Laura Kremmel. Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. pp. 91 -100.

Reyes, Xavier Aldana. Body Gothic–Corporeal Transgression in Contemporary Literature and Film. University of Wales Press, 2014

Ross, Deborah. “Escape from Wonderland: Disney and the Female Imagination.” Marvels & Tales, vol. 18, no. 1, 2004, pp. 53–66.  

Sandars, Diana. “Wayfinding and Finding a Way to Intercultural Storytelling in Moana: Charting Disney’s Gothic in an Oceanic Creation Story.” In Gothic in the Oceanic South: Maritime, Marine and Aquatic Uncanny in Southern Waters. Routledge. (Forthcoming 2024).

Schickel, Richard. The Disney Version: The Life, Times, Art and Commerce of Walt Disney. Simon and Schuster,1968.

Spooner, Catherine. Post-millennial Gothic: Comedy, Romance and the Rise of Happy Gothic. Bloomsbury, 2017.

Swan, Susan Z. “Gothic drama in Disney's Beauty and the Beast: Subverting Traditional Romance by Transcending the Animal‐human Paradox”. Critical Studies in Media Communication, vol. 16, no.3, 1999, pp. 350-369. 

Whitley, David. The Idea of Nature in Disney Animation. Ashgate, 2008.

Zipes, Jack. The Enchanted Screen: The Unknown History of Fairy-Tale Films. Routledge, 2011.

Last updated December 15, 2023

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