Franken(stein)weenie: a reescritura do gótico por Tim Burton

Abstract

Filmmaker, writer, director and multiartist, Tim Burton has built a unique narrative project in his films, drawings, narrative poems and novel. His sources of inspiration are the gothic, the fantastic and fairy tale narratives (SOARES; SIMÕES, 2008; NABIS, 2010), and his creations display the strong appeal of children and young adult literature as an evident trait. Hence, Burton realizes his authorial mark, in which aspects of the gothic are highlighted recurringly. His works acquire a new guise as they revisit literary and horror cinema classics, by starting from a peculiar perspective: that of children’s imagination. With specific focus on the Frankenweenie (2012) feature film, this study sets off from the hypothesis that Burton appropriates elements already crystalized in the gothic narrative, imbuing them with a new configuration and generating innovative effects in this process. I draw a line which accompanies the history of the conception of the gothic, especially in the field of literature (CUDDON, 1999), observing its outlines as a literary genre and also paying attention to its elements and effects (GROOM, 2012); in order to reach the perception of the gothic as a literary mode (CUDDON, 1999; SÁ, 2019). These considerations subsidize the analytic part of the study, which is organized in three focal points: the figuration of individual and collective fear (DELUMEAU, 2009), observed in its diegetic relation to the gothic (LOVECRAFT, 1987) and the dystopian (KUMAR, 1987; CLAEYS, 2017); the representation of the dead body and its capacity to generate the fear of death in the individual and the collective imaginaries (BLOCH, 1995; TUAN, 2005); and, finally, an exploration of the postmodernist aesthetics of the work in focus, carried out in the light of the concepts of pastiche and parody (COPATI; LAGUARDIA, 2013; FERNANDES; HUTCHEON, 1989; MAGALHÃES, 2018; SALES, 2020), and in association with two cinematographic elements – the matrix and the mise-en-scène (CORTEZ et al., 2006). This study reassesses the contemporary reconfigurations of the gothic, identifying and reflecting on the forms by which the rewriting of the gothic narrative, such as realized by Burton, provokes singular effects, such as the awakening of young readers empathy towards otherness, metaphorized by the monstrous element in the film. Finally, I stress this dissertation’s contribution to the studies aligned with contemporary (re)readings of the gothic; to the critical studies on Tim Burton; and to the area of cinema studies, more specifically in the field of animations aimed at children and young adult audiences.