ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the "Definitions of Territories," novelist and critic Italo Calvino traces the antecedents of modern fantasy literature. It examines the French academy's notion of the fantastique, mainly rooted in the cathartic experiences of gothic horror. The chapter also discusses the "wonderlands," "slumberlands" and "plunderlands" of the animated "worlds" conjured in the Disney, Svankmajer and Burton adaptations, first by defining animation itself in the spirit of magic and the plasmatic. All fantasy narratives are essentially hypothetical, and sometimes counterintuitive, but as Torben Grodal notes, "the fantastic world is rarely one in which all causality is absent; rather it is a more unstable world in which normal causality can break down and new magical laws emerge. The inherently rhetorical nature of animation speaks to alternative interrogations and interventions in every instance of its creation, and its enunciative qualities insist upon notions of "difference".
