Gothic Fantasy E-Book

Edwin Page

• Herausgeber: Marion Boyars
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2006

Beschreibung

Edwin Page takes us on a journey through the films of Tim Burton, through which we gain insights into the mysterious, and somewhat reclusive film director responsible for them. A book ideally suited to film studies and media studies, at school and undergraduate level, this book has analysis of the filming methods devised by Tim Burton, and descriptions of his works, including Beetlejuice, Batman, Edward Scissorhands, Batman Returns, The Nightmare Before Christmas, Ed Wood, Mars Attacks!, Sleepy Hollow, Planet of the Apes, Big Fish, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and Corpse Bride.

Leseprobe

by Edwin Page

Dedicated to Charlotte & Ellen

‘Thanks for all your support’

&

With a special mention for Hannah Lucy Ross

Contents

Title Page

Dedication

Introduction

1. Tim Burton: The Man Behind the Movies

2. A Life in Film

3. Beetlejuice

4. Batman

5. Edward Scissorhands

6. Batman Returns

7. The Nightmare Before Christmas

8. Ed Wood

9. Mars Attacks!

10. Sleepy Hollow

11. Planet of the Apes

12. Big Fish

13. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory

14. Corpse Bride

15. The Fairytale Goes On…

Appendix One: Tim Burton, Main Credits

Appendix Two: Films, Main Cast and Crew

Appendix Three: List of Illustrations

Copyright

Introduction

After being immersed in the work of Tim Burton for a while things can get a little strange. You see movement in the shadows and when you turn to look there’s nothing there. Life feels slightly unreal. There’s a sense of the mysterious hanging in the air like the fog in his film Sleepy Hollow. You see things in a different light.

When watching the stylised movies that have made Tim Burton a household name, it is easy to see why they can have such a profound effect. They are like fairytales, communicating to us on a symbolic level, speaking of things far deeper within our conscious and subconscious minds than most films would dare to delve.

Issues of alienation, insanity and a wish for acceptance are among those raised in expressionistic and gothic surroundings. The films explore life and death, tackling fundamental moral questions that stem from the balance of dark and light within each of us. Most importantly, they have the power to connect with us on a personal level, a power gained from the fact that Burton invests so much of himself into each movie that he works on. There is a humanity present that can reach out from the screen and touch us in a way that isn’t possible with the run-of-the-mill Hollywood movies, which are so often devoid of such a personal touch, communicating only on a level of pure entertainment.

This is not to say that Tim Burton’s work isn’t entertaining, it is – and often very much so – but his work transcends this basic function of film. Burton is one of the few filmmakers who retains both integrity and passion, he won’t agree to do a film unless he feels a personal connection with it – which is fortunate for his audience who can reap the benefits of this absolute commitment.

Burton’s films aren’t so much about the plot as they are about creating a mood, conveying emotion and communicating through the use of symbolism. This is why they resonate so strongly with such a wide audience. They talk to us individually about what it is to be human. They take us on an emotional journey: from the laughter of Beetlejuice to the tears of Big Fish, from the bittersweet fairytale of Edward Scissorhands to the heart warming story of Charlieand the Chocolate Factory, from the horror of Sleepy Hollow to the vibrant playfulness of Mars Attacks!, and from the brooding darkness of Batman to the hopeful naivety of The Nightmare Before Christmas.

During the course of this book each of his major feature films will be examined and the trademarks evident within them will be identified. The extent of his personal involvement will become clear, as well as other characteristic Burton traits such as his recurring collaborations with various actors and crew members.

I started writing the book as a fan and have ended it as a devotee who marvels at the depth of imagery created by one of modern cinema’s truly great directors. So, let the journey begin. Read on and explore the unique cinematic experience of the films of Tim Burton.

1. Tim Burton: The Man Behind the Movies

Tim Burton is a tall man usually dressed in black. His dark hair is often wild and unruly, Johnny Depp stating that ‘a comb with legs would have outrun Jesse Owens given one look at this guy’s locks.’1 All his films have been affected by his childhood experiences, experiences which still have a strong resonance with Tim Burton the man. This personal touch has meant that his movies communicate a deep sense of humanity to those that see beyond the stunning visuals and often playful plotlines.

Born on 25th August 1958, Timothy William Burton spent the first ten years of his life living with his parents and younger brother in Burbank, California. Burbank is the location of a number of film and television studios, including Disney, NBC and Warner Brothers, so even as a boy he was close to the industry he would eventually become part of.

He couldn’t understand why his parents sent him to Sunday school when they weren’t really religious or why they had a certain picture hanging on their lounge wall despite the fact they didn’t seem to have any real feelings for it. He also couldn’t understand why they blocked up the windows of his bedroom, leaving only high slits for the light to shine through. So, distanced from his parents and younger brother due to his perceived ‘difference’, Burton moved in with his grandmother at the age of ten and remained with her until leaving high school.

He saw the suburban life as lacking in passion, as a kind of colourless, flat landscape in which no one really knew anyone else beneath the façade of normality. He has said of his experience of living in suburbia that there was ‘no passion for anything, just a quiet, kind of floaty kind of semi-oppressive blank palette that you’re living in.’2

In order to escape these oppressive feelings Burton would indulge in creative and quite ingenious pranks. At one time, with the help of some other children, he distributed debris and stamped footprints around a local park, and then persuaded other kids that aliens had crash-landed there. He also faked fights in the neighbourhood and once convinced another child that a killer had died after falling into a swimming pool, their body having dissolved due to the fact that the pool had recently been cleaned with chloride (the tall tale was supported by some clothes he’d thrown into the water).3

Due to his suburban upbringing, Burton developed the belief that society tries to suppress any creativity and passion an individual may feel, while at the same time a particular culture is enforced upon us, almost suffocating any creative urges we may possess. Because of this he says that individuals need a ‘certain kind of strength and simplicity’ in order to break through the enforced, cultural framework.4 This ‘strength and simplicity’ is exactly what Burton employed in his passion for drawing, a passion that continues to this day. It is also evident in his films on a visual level, making his movies highly identifiable.

The symbolism Burton uses in his films provides clear evidence of his taste in painters and paintings. He’s a particular fan of expressionist and impressionist work, such as that of Vincent Van Gogh, and it is fair to say that his work is influenced by these tastes. He says of these paintings, ‘they’re not real, but they capture such an energy that makes it real, and that to me is what’s exciting about movies.’5 In the same way his films are not trying to assimilate reality, but are highly symbolic and stylised in order to capture and convey the complexity of emotions within the narratives.

Burton finds drawing both satisfying and cathartic, claiming that, ‘I think best when I’m drawing.’6 His art was a way for him to create his identity and to express the emotions and feelings he had within. He describes his drawings as being part of an impulse to be seen for what he was, and one of his biggest influences as a child was ‘Dr Seuss,’ whose books he has described as ‘beautiful and subversive.’7

Burton often uses his drawings to explain certain elements of his films to production designers, directors of photography and even the actors involved. For example, he has made sketches of Edward Scissorhands, the Penguin from Batman Returns and Ichabod Crane from Sleepy Hollow in order to show the kind of look he was seeking from the characters.

Ultimate Quote

‘Like most kids, I felt different… I felt like a foreigner in my own neighbourhood and in my own country’ – Tim Burton8

Perhaps attributable to this tendency to work things out visually rather than verbally or through the written word, Burton also enjoys photography. He appreciates the fact that this visual element ‘taps into your subconscious,’ explaining how, ‘it’s a more real emotion than if I intellectualise it in my mind. I like just trying something either in a drawing or photo… It’s a visual concept as opposed to thinking.’9

His boyhood pictures may not have been intended for show, but his films certainly are, reaching wide and often spellbound audiences. This provokes a strange reaction from their creator, who has claimed he is unable to bear watching his films in anything other than small parts until about three years after their release.10 In part he is afraid of how they will be received, explaining that ‘I love the making-of process, but I get very vulnerable at the end of it. It’s like I’m afraid to show it to anybody.’11 For Burton, the process of filmmaking must be particularly harrowing, his movies are so very personal – almost a reflection of his mind. It is hardly surprising that he is somewhat fearful of what he has displayed of himself in these films, what he has revealed to the global audience of millions. As I aim to emphasise, however, it is this very willingness to expose his interior world, and make himself vulnerable, that gives his films the impact and the lasting quality that they have.

Burton’s other major boyhood passion was monster movies and horror films, especially those starring Vincent Price and based on the dark tales of Edgar Allen Poe, such as The Pit and the Pendulum (1961) and The Raven (1963), both of which were directed by Roger Corman. He also enjoyed the British ‘Hammer Horror’ films, the films of James Whale, such as his 1931 version of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, and he also regularly watched ‘The Twilight Zone’ and ‘The Outer Limits’.

In the realm of monster movies Burton loved the stop-motion animation work of Ray Harryhausen which can be seen in such films as The Golden Voyage of Sinbad (Hessler, 1974), Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger (Wanamaker, 1977), Clash of theTitans (Davis, 1981), and in Jason and the Argonauts (Chaffey, 1963), which is the first film that Burton recalls seeing.12 His enthusiasm for the way in which these films were created was to become clear when he created his own stop-motion movies and used the technique for special effects in films such as Beetlejuice.

In the monster and horror films which helped him to get through his younger years, Burton found himself identifying with the monsters rather than the heroes, as the monsters tended to show passion whereas the leads were relatively emotionless. Indeed, Burton saw them as representative of suburbanites.13 It is also the case that the monster is the outsider, the alienated; feelings that Burton was familiar with. The monster is also often misunderstood, such as in King Kong (Cooper & Schoedsack, 1933) and The Hunchback of Notre Dame (Dieterle, 1939), and again, Burton found he could easily identify with such themes. He was also attracted to horror films because of the ‘grand melodramatic emotion,’14 and we see this reflected in the emotive content of his own films.

This intensity aside, Burton’s initial motivation was almost accidental. One of his first brushes with film making was down to the fact that he hadn’t read a book about Houdini for a final exam at school. Because of this he filmed a little, Super 8 movie based on Houdini’s escape antics, including tying himself to railroad tracks. As he recalls the story, ‘It impressed the teacher and I got an A’, going on to explain how this affected him, ‘that was maybe my first turning point, when I said, “Yeah, I wouldn’t mind being a filmmaker.”’15

Leaving high school a semester early, Burton went on to the California Institute of the Arts after winning a scholarship. The Institute of the Arts was founded by Walt and Roy Disney, and provided a training ground for animators who would go on to work for the studio – Burton being one of these. Actually, he’d only decided to follow animation as a career because at one time his parents had wanted him to become a court reporter, and he thought becoming an animator was the better option of the two.

Burton’s final project in his third year at the Institute was an animation called Stalk of the Celery Monster. In this short we see something which would become a trademark of Burton’s professional career, this being a misperceived lead character. This character appears to be Frankenstein-esque as he tortures a woman with apparent menace. However, it turns out that he is a dentist and she is his patient.

Ultimate Quote

‘In animation you could communicate through drawings and I was perfectly happy to communicate in that way and not in any other way’ – Tim Burton16

It was on the strength of this short that the Disney head-hunters chose Burton as one of the students who would join Disney. Rick Heinrichs, a fellow student and regular collaborator with Burton, says that his friend was picked because he used his film ‘to tell a story and to create a complex set of relationships between a group of characters. Nobody was more surprised than Burton when he was selected.’17

He was added to Disney’s group of talented artists in 1979, something that many would see as a dream job. However, to Burton it was like a nightmare. He was expected to be an expressive artist while at the same time conforming to the Disney style of animation in an environment not unlike a production line. He felt chained to his animation desk and has said of the time, ‘I learned to sleep with my pencil in my hand sitting up at my desk so when the bosses came in I’d just boink [blinks awake and sits upright].’18

During his relatively short time working for Disney in this way Burton produced artwork for the film The Fox and the Hound (Berman & Rich, 1981). He also created early conceptual work for The Black Cauldron (Berman & Rich, 1985), none of which was eventually used. The problem was that his work wasn’t your usual Disney fare, it was simply too distinctive, as anyone can tell from the look of his films (which are often formulated at an early stage through his artwork).

Strangely – considering how tortured he felt working at Disney – it would be that studio that allowed Burton to break into film directing. When it became apparent he was not able to draw such things as cute foxes, he was given more scope to work on his own projects, and due to this he created three short films (to be discussed in the following chapter). This was the pivotal move that launched his career –and the rest, as they say, is history.

Burton’s time at Disney, along with his love of drawing, has meant that his films portray a highly stylised world. He communicates predominantly through imagery, which is often symbolic. He has always felt awkward with verbal communication, which is partially why he drew as a child (and continues to do so). These feelings are highlighted by a particularly symbolic dream he experienced as a child where a ‘tough, purple, rubberish sea plant’ was growing out of his mouth so that he couldn’t speak. No matter how hard he tried to tear it away it just kept growing.19

Some people say that Burton has remained in touch with the ‘child within’, and that this element makes itself apparent in his work. However, Burton doesn’t agree, objecting that, ‘I really hate…that fucking “child within” bullshit.’20 Part of his dislike of this viewpoint is that he believes we all contain aspects of both child and adult, good and bad, that we are all dualities trying to come to terms with who we are in the best way we can.

Burton’s dislike of such statements also stems from his disdain of categorisation. He saw that it was very apparent in school and in the suburban environment where he lived, and, being on the receiving end as someone seen as weird and an outsider, realised also just how damaging categorisation can be. He therefore fights against it in his movies, and one way he does this is by showing how categorisation can often lead to misperception. An example of this is the giant in Big Fish. The townspeople are fearful of him, have categorised him as a bad, bloodthirsty, potentially human-scoffing beast. We soon find this to be completely untrue.

Ultimate Quote

‘I remember growing up and feeling that there is not a lot of room for acceptance… From day one you’re categorised’ – Tim Burton21

This instance further highlights the fact that Burton sees the world in a different way from the majority of people. Another example of this arises in relation to Batman Returns. Many people, especially parents, complained that the film was too dark. Burton didn’t see it that way at all. In fact, he states that he sees films such as Lethal Weapon (Donner, 1987) as much darker due to the continual use of guns and the comedic touches sometimes given to killing.

There are those who criticise Burton’s films for story inconsistencies and glaring problems with the narrative. However, this is because they are judging his films from an intellectual standpoint, which is entirely the wrong approach for films that have been created through passion: a passion

which makes itself known visually rather than verbally or through the written word.

Tim Burton’s films must be judged emotionally and symbolically before all else, something underlined by the director, who states, ‘that probably means the most to me: when people get the emotional quality underneath the stupid façade.’22 There is no room for intellectualising because Burton is not trying to communicate on an intellectual level; he is instead conducting an emotional conversation with himself on screen, releasing the feelings he has within. Yes, ‘a conversation with himself’ may seem a strange claim for films which reach out to millions of people, but this is truly the case. They are an extension, an evolution of the times when he was a boy and created art only for himself. He creates his films for himself; not for reward or acclaim.

Ultimate Quote

‘He [Tim Burton] is to me a true genius… in not just film, but drawings, photographs, thought, insight and ideas’ – Johnny Depp23

So, the questions we should be asking of his movies aren’t such things as ‘How does the narrative hold together?’ or ‘Is the story consistent?’. We should be asking such things as ‘In what way do they stir our emotions?’ and ‘How are they symbolic of the human condition?’ It’s clearly not what you think about his films that’s important, but what you feel.

Endnotes

1. Salisbury, M. (ed.) – Burton on Burton – Revised Edition, p.X (Faber and Faber, 2000, UK)

2.Unknown – Biography for Tim Burton (I) (www.imdb.com)

3.Fraga, K. (ed.) – Tim Burton Interviews, p.162 (University Press of Mississippi, 2005, US)

4. Fraga, K. (ed.) – Tim Burton Interviews, p.44 (University Press of Mississippi, 2005, US)

5. Salisbury, M. (ed.) – Burton on Burton – Revised Edition, p.175 (Faber and Faber, 2000, UK)

6. McMahan, A. – The Films of Tim Burton: Animating Live Action in Contemporary Hollywood, p.20 (Continuum Books, 2005, US)

7. Fraga, K. (ed.) – Tim Burton Interviews, p.169 (University Press of Mississippi, 2005, US)

8. Unknown – Tim Burton (http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/ article/0,,14931-1695710_3,00.html)

9. Salisbury, M. (ed.) – Burton on Burton – Revised Edition, p.158 (Faber and Faber, 2000, UK)

10. Salisbury, M. (ed.) – Burton on Burton – Revised Edition, p.146 (Faber and Faber, 2000, UK)

11. Unknown – Tim Burton (http://entertainment.timesonline. co.uk/article/0,,14931-1695710_3,00.html)

12.Salisbury, M. (ed.) – Burton on Burton – Revised Edition, p.2 (Faber and Faber, 2000, UK)

13. Fraga, K. (ed.) – Tim Burton Interviews, p.48 (University Press of Mississippi, 2005, US)

14. Fraga, K. (ed.) – Tim Burton Interviews, p.60 (University Press of Mississippi, 2005, US)

15. Unknown – Biography for Tim Burton (I) (www.imdb.com)

16. Fraga, K. (ed.) – Tim Burton Interviews, p.53 (University Press of Mississippi, 2005, US)

17. McMahan, A. – The Films of Tim Burton: Animating Live Action in Contemporary Hollywood, p.22 (Continuum Books, 2005, US)

18. Kermode, M. (int.) – Tim Burton Interviewed by Mark Kermode (II) (http://film.guardian.co.uk/Guardian_NFT/interview/ 0,4479,120877,00)

19.Fraga, K. (ed.) – Tim Burton Interviews, p.46 (University Press of Mississippi, 2005, US)

20. Fraga, K. (ed.) – Tim Burton Interviews, p.43 (University Press of Mississippi, 2005, US)

21. Salisbury, M. (ed.) – Burton on Burton – Revised Edition, p.87 (Faber and Faber, 2000, UK)

22. Salisbury, M. (ed.) – Burton on Burton – Revised Edition, p.126 (Faber and Faber, 2000, UK)

23. Salisbury, M. (ed.) – Burton on Burton – Revised Edition, p.XII (Faber and Faber, 2000, UK)

References

Jackson, M & McDermott, A. – Tim Burton Biography (www.timburtoncollective.com/bio)

2. A Life in Film

‘All right everybody,

start your engines, this is it’

– Ben Frankenstein in Frankenweenie

This chapter charts Tim Burton’s career in the movies, starting with his work at Disney in the early eighties and ending with the 2005 stop-motion film The Corpse Bride.

The Super 8 films Burton made in his youth have already been mentioned in Chapter One. The first films he made in adulthood were created at weekends, using any spare time he could grab whilst working at Disney, where he found the atmosphere severely frustrating. He and other employees who were also unhappy with the working environment at Disney made two films independently of the studio.

The first of these was called Doctor of Doom (1980) and was filmed on video. This black and white film featured Burton as Dr. Doom and was created with intentionally bad dubbing to give the impression of a foreign import.1 The second film was entitled Luau (1982). A homage to beach-blanket films, this included song and dance routines, with Burton playing the disembodied head of ‘The Most Powerful Being in the Universe.’2 All the films that followed were made with the support of studios.

The first of three shorts he created for Disney was a homage to his favourite horror actor Vincent Price, who many will remember as the narrator in Michael Jackson’s ‘Thriller’ video. Burton had been working on a children’s book when the studio gave him sixty thousand dollars to make something of his own. So he decided to turn the story into a short film utilising both drawn and stop-motion animation.

Entitled Vincent (1980) it was a six minute film about a boy called Vincent Malloy who wanted to be Vincent Price. Using lyrical verse and shot in black and white, Vincent was narrated by Tim Burton’s horror hero.

Price was the first film star that Burton had worked with and he said that ‘he turned out to be a wonderful person.’ Talking to Lawrence French, he went on to say, ‘he gave me a lot of hope and was a great inspiration to me.’4 This inspiration began in Burton’s youth when he watched Price in various horror films and then continued into adulthood when they became friends after collaborating on Vincent.

This first short film of Burton’s is similar in look and tone to the later TheNightmare Before Christmas. Two of his trademarks are apparent throughout its duration, the first being a dog and the second being a tower, which references castles. As we shall see, these two features are present in a number of his other movies.

Ultimate Quote

‘Tim recited the poem for me and asked me to narrate it. I was really struck by his charm and enthusiasm, so I said yes. Tim is really in love with film and is a wonderful kind of mad fellow’ – Vincent Price3

Vincent also includes aspects which are of personal significance to Burton himself, such as Edgar Allen Poe and drawing. Thus even his first film drew upon his own personal experiences, as would his later work. Vincent is also typically dark and gothic. It is clearly Burton through and through and his appeal became immediately apparent when it won two awards at the Chicago Film Festival and the Critic’s Prize at the Annecy Film Festival in France.

The second film was entitled Hansel and Gretel (1982), and was a new take on the Grimm Brothers’ fairytale. It was an animated martial arts short in which the title characters end up having a kung-fu fight with the witch (played by a man). Costing $116,000, this short was made for The Disney Channel, which was still in its infancy at the time. It was written by Julie Hickson, who was also the executive producer, and produced the third and final short film Burton created while working at Disney.

Ultimate Fact

After Tim Burton and Vincent Price had met for the creation of Vincent they remained friends right until Price’s death in 1993.

This film was called Frankenweenie (1984) and is a take on Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein which cost almost a million dollars. It is only one of two films that Burton wrote, the other being Vincent. It was also soon after Frankenweenie that he left Disney.

In the film, a boy’s dog is killed when it is hit by a car and, taking inspiration from the original story, the boy decides to bring him back to life. This twenty-seven minute, live-action short was intended to be shown with Disney’s Pinocchio, but received a PG rating which meant this couldn’t happen. It was then not seen for a number of years until achieving a limited release on video. However, both Frankenweenie and Vincent have since been released on the special edition DVD of The Nightmare Before Christmas and are well worth a watch.

Right at the start of Frankenweenie there is an element which draws on Burton’s childhood experiences. The boy in the film is showing his parents a short film that he has made, echoing Burton’s own experiences of making Super 8 films in his youth. It also reflects the fact that Burton loves monster movies; the boy’s film is called Monsters from Long Ago.

A graveyard in the title sequence of Frankenweenie is one of those incredibly gothic images common to Burton’s work. What follows is a slightly macabre scene in a classroom, made all the more atmospheric by the use of black and white. What we also soon discover is an element of black humour. We realise that the boy, called Victor, will attempt to use electricity to bring his dog back to life, a dog which is humorously called ‘Sparky’. This mix of dark undertones with comic touches is typical of Burton’s work and can also be seen in the fact that the boy’s name is Victor Frankenstein, played perfectly by Barret Oliver, who went on to star in Ron Howard’s Cocoon (1985).

Ultimate Fact

Daniel Stern plays Victor’s father in Frankenweenie and would go on to play the bungling burglar Marv in HomeAlone (Columbus, 1990). Jason Hervey also has a small part in Burton’s film and went on to appear in the popular TV series ‘The Wonder Years’ (1988-1993).

Frankenweenie is also typically atmospheric, including the use of a thunderstorm which begins when Victor goes to the cemetery to dig up Sparky’s body. In fact, this has a distinctly ‘Hammer Horror’ feel to it; a sense of the dramatic mixed with the macabre. There is also the clear feeling of a sugary sweet suburbia, the boy’s actions gaining increased visual and emotional impact due to their juxtaposition with this. Such a vision of suburbia would later be taken to the extreme in Edward Scissorhands.

Another aspect which would resurface in a later film, namely Beetlejuice, was the use of a book featuring very unusual instructions. In Frankenweenie we see Victor reading a book called Electricity and the Creation of Life. In Beetlejuice the main characters find a copy of The Handbook for the RecentlyDeceased after their untimely demise.

As with many classic horrors, the beast, the reanimated Sparky, isn’t understood by the local residents, who want to kill the dog. During the following mob sequence we see an old, tatty windmill which is strikingly similar to that which is seen in Sleepy Hollow, even to the point of it burning down. On the same crazy golf course where the windmill is located we also see a fairytale castle, something inferred in Vincent and symbolically present in a number of Burton’s other films. Though possibly not intentionally linked to the Disney logo (a fairytale castle), it does seem rather apt as Frankenweenie was a Disney production.

Ultimate Quote

‘His early film career was fuelled by almost unbelievable good luck, but it’s his talent and originality that have kept him at the top of the Hollywood tree’.6

Sparky saves Victor from the flames and the locals realise he isn’t bad after all. At the end there is another touch of humour when Sparky and a poodle fall in love, the poodle modelling hair like that of Elsa Lanchester in Bride ofFrankenstein (Whale, 1935). A homage is also made to James Whale’s Frankenstein (1931) with Sparky sporting bolts on either side of his neck like Boris Karloff as the monster in that classic movie.

The internationally bestselling horror author, Stephen King, saw Frankenweenie and recommended it to an executive at Warner Brothers. It was then shown to the man behind the character of Pee-Wee Herman, Paul Reubens, who decided that Tim Burton, who was only twenty-six at the time, was the perfect director for his forthcoming film Pee-Wee’s BigAdventure.5 And that’s how Burton moved from animation and shorts into the world of making feature-length movies; with a big stroke of luck.

Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure (1985) had a low budget of only six million dollars, but went on to be a surprise hit at the box office, grossing forty-five million. Though the character of Pee-Wee Herman had already been well-defined by Reubens in his hit TV shows ‘The Pee-Wee Herman show’ and ‘Pee-Wee’s Playhouse,’7 Burton still made an unmistakable mark on this movie. Paul Reubens was a member of a group of improvisational comedy actors called ‘The Groundlings’ who were based in Los Angeles. His alter-ego, Pee-Wee, had already appeared on such US shows as ‘Letterman’ and Johnny Carson’s ‘The Tonight Show’. Pee-Wee was a man with a squeaky voice, rouged cheeks and the mental age of a child.

Ultimate Quote

‘It’s hard for me to imagine a first movie, unless I had created it myself, that I could have related to as well as I did to Pee-Wee’ – Tim Burton8

The film follows Pee-Wee’s search for his precious bicycle, which has been stolen despite a good deal of security. The movie begins with Pee-Wee dreaming of winning the Tourde France on the aforementioned bike, something which immediately informs the audience of the peddle-powered vehicle’s importance. Verbal jokes and visual gags abound as Pee-Wee goes in search of his possession, going from a dinosaur park in Palm Springs to the Alamo and eventually

ending up at the Warner Brothers studio in Burbank (which seems very apt considering Burton was brought up in that location). These varied locations display the use of different genres, especially when Pee-Wee arrives at the studio. This generic blurring would also be apparent in Beetlejuice.

Speaking to David Breskin in 1991, Burton said, ‘the most fun day I think I’ve ever had was on Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure in the scene at the Alamo, with Jan Hooks, who played the guide. That was all improv and it was so much fun.’9 This shows that Tim Burton enjoys spontaneous creativity without being unnecessarily restricted by script, something which he experienced again in the making of Beetlejuice (with Michael Keaton being a particularly spontaneous actor).

As well as improvisation, Burton also got the chance to include stop-motion in the movie, which is a fundamental part of the fingerprint he left on the film. There are two elements of this form of animation, the first being a dream sequence in which a T-Rex eats Pee-Wee’s bike. The second occurs when Pee-Wee comes face to face with the truck driver, Large Marge, whose face mutates before his very eyes. Both sequences were animated by Rick Heinrichs, who acted in Luau, produced Vincent, was associate producer on Frankenweenie, and would go on to be production designer on Batman Returns and Planet of the Apes, as well as visual consultant on The Nightmare Before Christmas.

Ultimate Fact

Paul Reubens and Tim Burton attended the California Institute of the Arts at the same time, but never met while there.

An encounter with another figure who crops up in further Burton films takes place shortly after Pee-Wee’s meeting with Large Marge. At a roadside rest stop, he ends up talking to a waitress, played by Diane Salinger who went on to play the Penguin’s mother in Batman Returns while Paul Reubens played the Penguin’s father.

There is a further element in Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure that relates to another of Burton’s films. This is the skeletal reindeer which takes Pee-Wee his toast. It was taken from Burton’s already devised design for the reindeer in The Nightmare Before Christmas, a film which Burton had also storyboarded by that time.

It was on this, Burton’s first feature, that he first teamed up with Danny Elfman, who was lead singer with the cult group The Oingo Boingo Band and who hadn’t previously created a film score. This working relationship would come to incorporate all bar one of Burton’s feature-length films and is one of a number of relationships which have continued over large parts of his career. Burton has said of Elfman’s score for Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure that ‘music is always important, but that was really the first time it was like a character, definitely a character.’10

One of the things that encouraged Burton to direct this film was the fact that Pee-Wee is an outsider. Another appealing factor may have been the blurring of reality and fiction, in that the distinction between Reubens the actor and Pee-Wee the character had become blurred through the TV show. Burton likes to explore the delineation of boundaries and indulged this interest further in both Beetlejuice (where generic boundaries were blurred as well as those between life and the afterlife) and also Big Fish (in which the reality of the main character’s life was hardly distinct from his fantasy existence).

This film also gave Burton his introduction into merchandising as there was a wide range of Pee-Wee toys created. This marketing side of moviemaking was brought to the fore in the making of Batman, which we will investigate further in a later chapter. However, Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure also saw Burton receiving predominantly bad reviews despite the film’s good showing at the box office. Still, some of the reviewers changed their opinions in hindsight, Burton stating, ‘I got the worst reviews for Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure and then, as the years went by, I would read things from critics saying what a great movie it is.’11

Burton also directed two programs for television before his film career really took off. ‘Aladdin and his Wonderful Lamp’ (1984) was the first and was created for the ‘Faerie Tale Theatre’ series in the US. It featured the talents of James Earl Jones, who was the voice of Darth Vader in the original Star Wars trilogy, and Leonard Nimoy, who played Spock in the original ‘Star Trek’ series and starred in Invasion of the Body Snatchers (Kaufman, 1978). Both of these actors are sci-fi icons, so Burton was already working with big names in the realms of stardom.

Ultimate Fact

The heavy metal group Twisted Sister, who had hits in the 80s with such songs as ‘We’re Not Gonna Take It’ and ‘I Wanna Rock,’ appear in Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure performing a song entitled ‘Burn in Hell.’

A year later he directed ‘The Jar’ for the series called ‘Alfred Hitchcock Presents.’ The following year he was approached by Brad Bird, who had also worked on Disney’s The Fox and the Hound. He was asked to create some designs for an animated episode of the Steven Spielberg television series called ‘Amazing Stories.’ The episode was called ‘Family Dog’ and was a cartoon from the point of view of a suburban family’s dog. It was turned into a series by Amblin Entertainment, Tim Burton becoming its executive producer.

Burton has commented, ‘I just love the idea of trying to do something from a dog’s point of view. I don’t know why, but I always relate to dogs.’12 This fondness for dogs makes itself apparent in an obvious way in Frankenweenie. It also surfaces in Beetlejuice, in which a dog is responsible for the deaths of the lead characters, in Mars Attacks!, where one of the characters has her head transplanted onto her dog’s body, and in The Corpse Bride, which features a skeletal dog. This love of all things canine was also seen in Vincent, in which Vincent Malloy fantasises about turning his pet dog into a zombie.

The film that followed Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure in 1988 was the horror/comedy Beetlejuice. After that came Batman (1989), a film that made Tim Burton a household name. Then, with the release of Edward Scissorhands in 1990, Burton cemented his unmistakable style into the minds of filmgoers the world over. He was fast becoming one of only a few directors who have managed to create independently-minded and truly personal films within the Hollywood studio system, Woody Allen and Stanley Kubrick being other such directors.

Ultimate Fact

In 1992 director Cameron Crowe asked Tim Burton to appear in a small role in the film Singles. Burton agreed and his character, a director of videos for a dating agency, is referred to as ‘the next Martin Scorsese’ in the film.

It was becoming increasingly apparent that Burton was an auteur; a director with a style of his own, whose films could be recognised because of his distinct and very individual touch. His personal involvement was of an extent that rivalled directors such as Oliver Stone and Francis Ford Coppola, and his auteur status is also aided and abetted by his use of the same actors in more than one movie, as well as his regular use of some production team members, such as composer Danny Elfman. Part of the reason he tends to gravitate to the same people when making films is because he appreciates their passion, stating, ‘you’ve got to work with people whose passion makes it exciting.’13

Burton’s next big screen venture was the Batman sequel, Batman Returns, which was seen as darker than its predecessor. Then, in 1993, The Nightmare Before Christmas was released. It wasn’t actually directed by Burton, but by long-time friend and collaborator Henry Selick. It was based on a story and characters by Burton and is a feature-length stop-motion movie.

1994 saw Burton’s previous box office performances tarnished by the release of Ed Wood, which was praised by critics, but didn’t do too well on ticket sales. That year also saw the release of Disney’s Cabin Boy (Resnick, 1994), which was co-produced by Burton and which was a critical and commercial flop.

Burton next produced the third film in the Batman franchise, Batman Forever, which was released in 1995 and was directed by Joel Schumacher. In 1996 Mars Attacks! was released. Directed by Burton, it was greeted with a mixed response. That year he also co-produced James and the Giant Peach, which was based on the Roald Dahl story of the same name and was directed by his friend Henry Selick.

During the year after Mars Attacks! Burton worked on the proposed film Superman Lives for Warner Brothers. Nicolas Cage had already been signed up to play the hero and Burton met with the actor whose films include Wild at Heart (Lynch, 1990), Leaving Las Vegas (Figgis, 1995) and The Rock (Bay, 1996). They discussed focusing on the fact that Superman is an alien and trying to understand what that would be like, which of course followed Burton’s penchant for characters who suffer from alienation and are outsiders. He wanted to focus on this element above all, because he felt that of all the comic-book heroes ‘he’s actually the most two-dimensional’. Burton wanted to explore what it would be like ‘to be somebody who’s from another planet who can’t tell anyone and is completely different, but has to hide it.’14 They were even talking to Kevin Spacey, who has starred in such films as The Usual Suspects (Singer, 1995), K-Pax (Softley, 2001), and The Shipping News (Hallstrom, 2001), in the hope he would play Lex Luther.

Ultimate Quote

‘I don’t want to take just anything for the sake of saying, “I’m working.” I’ve got to like what I’m doing’ – Tim Burton15

However, the Superman Lives project was pulled on the heels of a bad reaction to the fourth Batman film, called Batman& Robin (Schumacher, 1997). In Tim Burton’s opinion this was done because Warner Brothers were fearful of ruining a second movie franchise after having done so with the Batman franchise and he states, ‘since the overriding factor in Hollywood is fear – decisions are based on fear most of the time.’16

While Burton was working on Superman Lives he was also working on his book of illustrated, poetic stories called The Melancholy Death of Oyster Boy and Other Stories. This served as an outlet for the frustrations he was feeling over the Warner Brothers’ project. This book was then published in 1997 and was dedicated to Lisa Marie, who was his girlfriend and muse at the time and who had also appeared in Ed Wood and Mars Attacks!, and would go on to have roles in Sleepy Hollow and Planet of the Apes.

The Melancholy Death of Oyster Boy and Other Stories contained twenty-three stories told in verse and accompanied by artwork created by Tim Burton. They have a typically Burtonesque tone which consists of both darkness and humour and the sense of alienation felt by Burton permeates the work. A reporter for the New York Times stated, ‘inspired by such childhood heroes as Dr. Seuss and Roald Dahl, Mr. Burton’s slim volume exquisitely conveys the pain of an adolescent outsider like his movies.’17

One of the characters from this book, a Tim Burton take on superheroes called ‘Stainboy,’ became the title character of a series of animated shorts on the internet in 2000. Danny Elfman was recruited for the score and Lisa Marie was the voice of Match Girl. All the animations were based on Burton’s own artwork and involved the colourful characters who appeared in Oyster Boy.

Stainboy is quite simply a boy who leaves dirty stains on everything he comes into contact with, including a new superhero outfit he is given in one of his two stories in the book. Speaking about this character Burton states, ‘Stainboy is one of my favourite characters [from the book] and in a way he’s probably the perfect symbol of that whole Superman experience.’18