A pale and lonely dark-eyed boy, out of place in the suntanned Burbank world of his youth, filmmaker Tim Burton refused to yield to the cookie-cutter homogeneity demanded by suburbia (and later by Disney), translating his alienation into a dark and highly personal vision that would resonate resoundingly with movie audiences. He drew great inspiration from Roger Corman's movies starring Vincent Price and as a natural progression immerse himself in the German expressionism of the 1920s and the Gothic horror of the 1930s. Ill-equipped to do things the Disney way while briefly toiling at the studio as an apprentice animator, he impressed future collaborators Henry Selick and Rick Heinrichs with his brilliant doodles. Despite being perceived as a weirdo, he also managed to make his own six-minute animated short, "Vincent" (1982), a wryly amusing little film portraying the dual life of a tortured, but seemingly normal suburban child who lives in a fantasy world of Gothic horror and imagines he is Vincent Price (who incidentally served as narrator). The autobiographical character was a prototype for the misunderstood, sympathetic outsider at the center of all the director's subsequent films.
Burton's follow-up, the 29-minute, partially live-action "Frankenweenie" (1984), was an inventive twist on the "Frankenstein" story. A young boy (Victor Frankenstein) brings his dead dog Sparky back to life (a la his namesake) thanks to the wonders of electricity, even jump-starting the canine later with a little jolt from a car battery, and Sparky eventually finds love with a poodle that recalls Elsa Lanchester's famous hairdo from 1935 classic "The Bride of Frankenstein". Considered too outre for a Disney product, it did not receive a proper release until 1992 when it finally became available on video and on The Disney Channel. A private showing for Paul Reubens, however, landed Burton his first feature directing assignment on the superlatively silly "Pee-Wee's Big Adventure" (1985). Though his first two films had been in black and white, the director adjusted readily, using primary colors to create Pee Wee's surreal, cartoon-like world without completely abandoning the dark side revealed in Pee Wee's nightmares. Though most critics savaged it, "Pee-Wee's Big Adventure" found a sizable audience, and a surprised industry duly took notice.
Building on the live-action cartoon style of his debut, Burton's "Beetlejuice" (1998) employed a fantastic array of outstanding special effects to tell its campy ghost story. When it too became a sleeper hit, Burton became an intriguing choice to direct "Batman" (1989), a project which allowed him, together with Oscar-winning set designer Anton Furst, to return to his beloved long shadows, jagged angles and distorted perspective for the imagery of the appropriately named Gotham City. If it had not been apparent before, "Batman" and Burton's even darker "Batman Returns" (1992) made it evident that a coherent narrative was an afterthought when compared with the director's remarkable visual style. For the former feature, that capability overcame the clunky story and somewhat leaden action sequences to bring in more than $400 million worldwide and a cool billion in merchandising. Unfortunately, the latter's performance at the box office (a mere $150 million), was decidedly lackluster, particularly considering it cost more than the first one. His decision to pass the reins to Joel Schumacher for "Batman Forever" (1995) probably brought a sigh of relief from studio execs, ecstatic to be free from the grim Burton vision.
In between "Batman"s, Burton delivered a strikingly original fable about a man-made boy whose creator dies before attaching hands to his body. Visually, the pastel plasticity of suburbia in "Edward Scissorhands" (1990) contrasted sharply with the Gothic angles of the scientist's mountaintop home, just as that day-glo community's superficial welcome vanished in the face of mob frenzy when Edward's difference became too threatening for the close-knit society. As the title character, former teen idol Johnny Depp was extremely effective in his mute, wide-eyed performance, and Burton's mentor Price provided a real emotional context in his cameo as the inventor. Despite his success, Burton has remained the misunderstood outsider, and "Scissorhands", a moderate hit in commercial terms, represents the movie that is perhaps closest to his heart. Expressing his deep affection for fairy tales, he weaves an underlying threat of love being a fatally attractive lethal weapon as Edward can't hold the girl he adores most (Winona Ryder), fearing he will cause her harm.
Burton returned to animation for the first time since "Vincent" as producer, creator and guiding sensibility behind "Tim Burton's 'The Nightmare Before Christmas'" (1993), the first full length stop-motion (three-dimensional figures, not drawings, repositioned from frame to frame) animated film produced by Disney. Burton had come up with the idea while employed by the studio in the early 80s, and when he tried to rescue it from the black hole it had fallen into there, he found Disney loathe to part with it and also leery of his ability to helm it what with his commitment to "Batman Returns". He got the project green-lighted when he turned it over to friend Selick, who had himself left Disney long ago but was a stop-motion veteran, having directed Pillsbury "Doughboy" commercials and an award-winning short called "Slow Bob in the Lower Dimensions" (1981), among other credits. Wildly imaginative in its excursion to the macabre, this twisted cousin to the cuddly Disney classics normally unveiled at Christmas featured trademark Burton designs and thematic concerns and had execs holding their collective breath waiting for the bomb to explode. The success of "Nightmare" again confounded the supposed experts and confirmed Burton as a commercial wunderkind.
The director's decision to shoot the biopic "Ed Wood" (1994) in black and white caused Columbia to pull out, leaving the field clear for Disney. Starring Depp as "the world's worst director", Burton's first period piece also featured Martin Landau in an astonishing, Academy Award-winning supporting turn as an aged and impoverished Bela Lugosi. (Rick Baker also won an Oscar for his makeup.) While smaller in scope than his last three outings, "Ed Wood" was also the first Burton movie grounded in a truthful, if bizarre, historical reality, unlike the internally consistent but fictional worlds of "Scissorhands" and the "Batman" movies. The cinematic love letter to Hollywood's Poverty Row, like "Scissorhands", was an extremely personal film, and many critics cited parallels between Wood's relationship with Lugosi and Burton's with Price. Despite its vivid recreation of time and place, it unfortunately did not appeal to mass tastes, bringing his string of box office successes to an end. Perhaps Columbia had been right about b/w not being commercial, or maybe the project just missed the touch of Danny Elfman, whose music had provided the perfect complement for Burton's vision on all his previous films.
Burton turned his attention next to "Mars Attacks!" (1996), a high-budget, special effects laden adaptation of a series of bubble gum trading cards spoofing the sci-fi thriller of the 50s and 60s. Boasting an all-star cast (including Annette Bening, Glenn Close, Michael J Fox and Jack Nicholson in a dual role), the film combined live-action with superb animation (the Martian characters) to tell its overly self-satisfied, ultimately one-note tale of alien invasion. A fabulous production design could not carry the day, proving that Burton's unquestioned visual genius had not yet mastered or found a way of doing without narrative. Its American box office failure, due in part to the success of the similarly themed blockbuster "Independence Day" released some five months earlier, though not branding the wunderkind an overnight pariah, certainly gave studios pause to wonder whether his delightfully demented vision would continue to sell. (European receipts vindicated him somewhat.) Undaunted by his inability to get his troubled "Superman" off the ground, he rebounded with "Sleepy Hollow" (1999, loosely based on Washington Irving's famous story), starring Depp as discredited professor Ichabod Crane, exiled for his outrageous theories to Sleepy Hollow, where he confronts the local myth of the headless horseman.
Planet of the Apes (2001)
Sleepy Hollow (1999)
Mars Attacks! (1996)
Marte Ataca (1996)
Ed Wood (1994)
The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993)
Batman Returns (1992)
Singles (1992)
Edward Scissorhands (1990)
Edward MãOs De Tesoura (1990)
Batman (1989)
Beetlejuice (1988)
Pee-wee's Big Adventure (1985)
Faerie Tale Theatre - Aladdin and His Wonderful Lamp (1984)
Frankenweenie (1984)