Tim Burton

Tim Burton: The Burbank Boy Who Drew Monsters

In November 2009 the Museum of Modern Art opened what it called its most comprehensive monographic exhibition ever devoted to a filmmaker. It contained more than seven hundred works — drawings, paintings, photographs, storyboards, puppets, costumes, amateur films — and a striking proportion of them had nothing to do with any film. They were doodles made at a desk. Between 1980 and 1986, while employed as a Disney animator, Tim Burton produced more than fifty pencil cartoons on animation paper, which MoMA describes as "a diversion for the apprentice artist from his routine animation work," full of "pent-up creative energy, youthful cynicism, and a taste for puns and sight gags." The exhibition's argument was that the doodles and the blockbusters are the same act.

Burbank

Timothy William Burton was born on 25 August 1958 in Burbank, California — a town whose principal industry was manufacturing other people's fantasies. MoMA's account of his childhood is a study in adolescent alienation from small-town life, with imagination deployed as solace: he compiled lists of films, organised screenings and shot his own shorts. What he consumed was classic American horror, 1950s science fiction and Japanese monster movies, all of which offered, in the museum's phrase, "relief from the boredom of his Burbank childhood."

This matters more than the usual director's-origin anecdote, because Burton's mature style is simply that boy's taste, unrevised. The suburb and the monster remain the two poles of nearly everything he has made.

CalArts, and Four Years at Disney

He spent two years at the California Institute of the Arts and then four as an animator at Disney in the early 1980s. On paper it was an apprenticeship; in practice it was a mismatch, and the mismatch was productive. MoMA identifies this as the period when his signature motifs consolidated: creature-based characterisation, masking, body modification, and a habit of blending sentiment, cynicism and humour in the same gesture.

The unrealised projects from these years are as revealing as the finished ones — *Trick or Treat* in 1980, a *Romeo and Juliet* pursued between 1980 and 1984, *Little Dead Riding Hood* in 1981. MoMA calls them a standing "imaginative resource of wit and invention." In 1983 he made a *Hansel and Gretel* for Disney, hosted by Vincent Price, supported by more than five hundred concept pieces, and broadcast exactly once.

Vincent and Frankenweenie

Two shorts got him out. *Vincent*, in 1982, was stop-motion animation narrated by Vincent Price, Burton's childhood idol, about a bored suburban boy who imagines himself into a world worthy of Edgar Allan Poe. It is, transparently, autobiography. *Frankenweenie* followed in 1984, moving Mary Shelley to Southern California and reconceiving Frankenstein's monster as a reanimated family pet — a joke that is also a genuine piece of feeling, which is the Burton formula in miniature.

Pee-wee to Batman

*Pee-wee's Big Adventure* in 1985 was his feature debut. *Beetlejuice* followed in 1988. Then *Batman* in 1989, with Jack Nicholson as the Joker, became the top-grossing film of its year and permanently changed what studios thought a comic-book adaptation could look like. *Batman Returns* came in 1992.

Between them came *Edward Scissorhands* in 1990, the first of his many collaborations with Johnny Depp, and the film in which the Burbank material is most nakedly on screen: a manufactured innocent with blades for hands, dropped into a pastel suburb that first adores and then hunts him.

The Line of Stop-Motion

Burton kept returning to animation, the medium he had entered and left. He produced *The Nightmare Before Christmas* in 1993, directed *Corpse Bride* in 2005 and remade *Frankenweenie* as a feature in 2012, earning an Academy Award nomination. In live action he made *Ed Wood* in 1994, which won Martin Landau an Oscar for his Bela Lugosi, then *Mars Attacks!*, *Sleepy Hollow*, *Planet of the Apes*, *Big Fish*, *Charlie and the Chocolate Factory*, which took $470 million worldwide, and *Sweeney Todd* in 2007, a Golden Globe winner for best film in the musical or comedy category. *Alice in Wonderland* in 2010 made a billion dollars and won two Academy Awards. Later came *Dark Shadows*, *Big Eyes*, *Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children*, *Dumbo*, the television series *Wednesday*, and *Beetlejuice Beetlejuice*.

Throughout, the constants were personnel: Depp, the composer Danny Elfman — who scored *Batman*, *Edward Scissorhands* and *The Nightmare Before Christmas* — the costume designer Colleen Atwood, the effects craftsman Stan Winston, and the puppet makers Ian Mackinnon and Peter Saunders. Venice gave him a Golden Lion for lifetime achievement in 2007.

Why Tim Is Called a Genius

The claim is about visual imagination and, more unusually, about consistency of vision under commercial pressure. MoMA's formulation is the sharpest available: Burton "reinvented Hollywood genre filmmaking as an expression of personal vision." That is a specific and difficult thing. Studios fund genre pictures precisely because they are impersonal and predictable; Burton got the money for those and delivered work that looks like the private sketchbook of one alienated teenager from Burbank. His curator, Ron Magliozzi, was blunt about the continuity between the art and the films: "We hope that our show will demonstrate that they are virtually the same." Magliozzi locates the underlying theme as "the dynamic, ongoing relationship between childhood and adulthood and the saving grace of creative activity," and reads Burton, against the gothic surface, as fundamentally optimistic.

The honest counter-case starts with MoMA itself. Magliozzi also situates Burton among "contemporaries in the post-modern generation who have taken their inspiration from pop culture" — comics, cartoons, toys, television, Japanese monster movies, carnival sideshows. The museum files him under Pop Surrealism, a Southern Californian mode drawing on surrealism and the "lowbrow" charm of pop culture. In other words, the style is assembled from borrowed parts by design, and Burton is one practitioner of a shared idiom rather than its sole inventor.

Two further reservations are fair. The sensibility has largely stopped developing: what was a vision in 1990 became, by the era of *Alice in Wonderland*, a look that could be applied to any acquired property and reliably monetised. And the gift is for design and atmosphere rather than dramaturgy — his films are more consistently beautiful than they are well-built, and the best of them, *Edward Scissorhands* and *Ed Wood*, are the ones where the private material and the story happen to be the same thing. Burton is a superb image-maker who is sometimes an excellent storyteller, and the distinction is worth keeping.

Legacy

The MoMA show ran until April 2010 and then travelled to Melbourne, Toronto, Los Angeles, Paris and Seoul; Burton made seven new works for it and, in Magliozzi's account, "opened his archive to us, without any apparent restrictions." Alongside the films sit the books — *The Melancholy Death of Oyster Boy and Other Stories* in 1997, *Tim Burton's Tragic Toys for Girls and Boys* in 2003, and the 430-page *The Art of Tim Burton* in 2010. His durable contribution is a proof of concept: that a genuinely idiosyncratic private world can be built at studio scale, and that audiences will pay for strangeness if it is sincere.

Achievements

• Golden Globe Award for Best Motion Picture – Musical or Comedy — 2008
• Daytime Emmy Award for Outstanding Children's Animated Program — 1990
• Notable work: The Nightmare Before Christmas
• Affiliated with Walt Disney Studios
• Educated at California Institute of the Arts and Burbank High School
• Worked as film director, screenwriter and film producer