On Tim Burton
Tim Burton grew up in Burbank, California with one younger brother. He describes himself as a peculiar child, who was very imaginative. When he was a teenager he and his brother staged an axe murder in their house which cause the neighbors to call the police. He got a scholarship to Disney’s California Institute of the Arts where he studies character animation. When he left school he got a job as an animation assistant for Disney. He did not fit in very well with the Disney crew when he tried to do the characters of Fox and the Hound as road kill. He completed his first short film Vincent in 1982. Vincent was a black and white stop action animation that portrayed 7-year-old boy Vincent Price. Vincent Malloy lives in a normal world, but has fantasies about being Vincent Price. The story goes back and forth from his real life to his dream world until the end the narrator quotes the end of Edgar Allen Poe’s The Raven and Vincent falls dead to the floor. Burton’s style uses very thin, pointy features that are exaggerated and borderline creepy. The characters are scary, yet endearing in that even though Vincent scares you, you can sympathize with him. This film won many small film awards, but was never released world wide.
Over the next few years, Burton worked on a various number of films including, Tex and Hansel and Gretel. In 1983, Burton made Frankenweenie, a thirty minute live action short. Frankenweenie chronicles the boy Victor in his quest to bring his beloved dog, Sparky, back to life after he is hit by a car. He builds a big machine in his bedroom that he hoods the lifeless Sparky up to one stormy night. The dog is revived, but considered a monster among the neighbors. They try to kill him, but he runs away to the wind mill of a mini golf course and Victor follows him. The windmill catches on fire and Sparky saves Victor’s life. Sparky dies again in the fire, but is brought back to life again by the neighborhoods joint efforts. Some of the themes that were seen in Vincent can be seen in this later film, such as doing science experiments on dogs. Also, clearly the lead characters’ names are similar.
Burton continued to do live action movies for the next decade or so, doing such films as Edward Scissor Hands, Batman, Pee Wee’s Big Adventure, etc., but he never gave up his dream to do a feature length animation. In 1993, Burton produced The Nightmare Before Christmas. Because he was filming Batman returns at the time, he could not direct the film, instead it was directed by Henry Selick. The movie is based on a poem that Burton wrote during the making of Vincent. It follows the life of Jack Skellington, the Pumpkin King of Halloween town. One day Jack stumbles upon a door that leads to Christmas Town, where he learns of many marvelous things. When Jack kidnaps Santa Claus to bring Christmas to Halloween, mayhem ensues. Nightmare was critically acclaimed and remains today one of the prime examples of stop motion animation.
As if Burton were not accomplished enough, he had a book published of his poems called The Melancholy Death of Oyster Boy and Other Stories. Some of these poems he later turned into short flash animations. The Melancholy Death of Oyster Boy, which told the story of a young couple who give birth to a boy who is half oyster. The couple then loses their love life and seeks guidance from a marriage counselor who suggests that they eat their son because oysters are aphrodisiacs. They then kill and eat their son. While the story was quite disturbing, especially since it was narrated in the sing song rhymes of Burton, it also showed some impressive animation techniques. He used both dolls and claymation for the film to best utilize the skills he had learned for stop motion movies. I also watched Robot Boy and Staring Girl in which the unlikely super hero Stain Boy defeats the two villains Robot Boy and Staring Girl. Burton uses a new medium for him, water colors. The story is told in black and white like the other animations, but the police in the story have much more detail than any other characters. Although they can only move from side to side in abrupt movements, their faces have wrinkles and noses. Stain Boy simply has big eyes and a cape.
Burton has always had a dark edge to his film making that some would say is inappropriate for children, but it is undeniable that he is quite the talented animator.
