A certain generation of film lovers consider Tim Burton one of the most distinctive American directors of all time. This is mostly due to juvenile tastes. His distinctive visual markers combined with a filmography of kid’s movies make him an ideal auteur for those who have never heard the word auteur. But Tim Burton is more than Baby’s first director. He’s a certain generation’s Tumblr mood board, Hot Topic’s money cow, and entry one on Henry Selick’s hit list. With ’90s kids and ’00s culture nostalgia seeping into every aspect of pop culture, Burton has found canonization among many important, and frankly far better, directors of his generation. It’s time to take a look back at the history of the stripe-obsessed director and determine whether or not he deserves a place in the hall of fame that AI-generated filler will eventually steal from.
The Lonely Pale Boy on the Hill (1958-1984)
Timothy Walter Burton was born in Burbank, California in 1958, a fact which clearly influenced a lot of his work. He’s described his childhood much as you’d expect from watching his movies. He himself was strange and unusual in a world that was oppressively normal to a fault. Sunshine and suburbia made little Timmy stand out awkwardly. At night, he retreated to the glow of the TV to escape the hyper-normality of real life.
Many of his main influences came from this childhood era. Through television came American monster flicks with work by Ray Harryhausen, Roger Corman, Christopher Lee, Bella Lugosi, and Boris Karloff. Science fiction B-movie reruns of the 1950s and 60s clearly became a big touchstone for the director. You can see his affinity for them all over his work.
But the biggest influence on Burton came from across the pond. Watch any German Expressionist movie in film school and start a stopwatch before someone mentions Burton’s name. It won’t take long. The 1919-1931 movement in filmmaking creates characters whose environments are surreal and emotionally driven. Most American directors at the time mined those movies for their use of expressive shadows in noir pictures but left behind the stage-like non-literal approach to sets and overly made-up black-and-white figures. Burton wholeheartedly embraced these elements, and 50+ years later, no less. Although it’s apparent this is true, he would later say he was more inspired by Dr. Suess than Dr. Caligari.
Having a head for free expression and a hand for drawing, a young Tim Burton joined CalArts’ animation department. He became part of the same animation wave that produced animation legends such as Brad Bird, John Musker & Ron Clements, John Lassetter, Andrew Stanton, and Pete Docter. Thus, the young animator joined Disney Animation straight out of college. While working on the House of Mouse’s The Fox and the Hound and The Black Cauldron, his fellow animators and superiors took notice of his instincts and talent for macabre design and darker emotional themes than Disney movies were typically willing to express. The studio considered several of his project pitches too outside the family brand. However, it finally granted the black-haired oddity a bit of cash to make his first animated short, Vincent (1982).
Vincent is an interesting first step into the Tim Burton mindset because of how perfectly it performs his filmography’s themes. The black and white stop motion short follows a pale boy named Vincent. Every day, the child dreams dark, noirish fantasies in which he is the horror actor Vincent Price. To the narration of the actor himself, the first of Burton’s pale, misunderstood protagonists haunts his way through imagined spotted and spackled creatures and misshapen persons. This is the premiere of the outsider character that Burton’s filmography will be an alter to. While fiction, the short could likely serve as the “Early Life” section of his Wikipedia page.
Impressed with his work, Disney gave Burton additional funds to make a live-action short called Frankenweenie (1984). Starring Shelley Duvall, the thirty-minute flick follows the death and subsequent undeath of a family dog. Disney planned to premiere it on television, only to decide eventually the material was, surprise, surprise, too dark for their brand. However, most of Burton’s contacts considered the short well-made and started to circulate it in Hollywood circles without official distribution.
There’s something audiences seem to forget about Tim Burton that’s even apparent as far back as these two early works. For all his crazy-haired fear-driven reference points, the man is a comedy director. Both shorts use the typical expressionistic ideas and morbid moments but have constant moments of levity that keep the whole thing dark but funny. We laugh at Vincent’s sister looking like an animatronic muppet or the soon-to-be mad scientist child looking out of what seems to be a rain-soaked window only to be revealed as being hosed. Like anyone with enough defense mechanisms, Burton sprinkles humor atop his genuine emotional moments.
So how does this failing animator get noticed? Lucky for him, meanwhile, in another part of showbusiness, another pale oddball was trying to break into the comedy scene. After just missing an opportunity to be on SNL, Paul Reubens joined the comedy group The Groundlings. It was during a 1977 show there showcasing awful standup comedians that Reubens debuted the most iconic character of his career, Pee-wee Herman. The character took off as an immediate hit, and by 1980 he had earned The Pee-wee Herman Show. When Reubens decided the character needed a bigger screen, he had his heart set on a certain quirky up-and-comer whose unique short had been making the rounds in Hollywood.
“It’s Showtime!” (1985-1994)
Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure is most notable in Tim Burton’s career for being his first movie and for having two auteurs. Although Reuben’s style of comedy is the dominant force of the film, Burton’s anachronisms shine in Pee-Wee’s anarchy. The throwback, all-too-chipper happy days town Pee-Wee lives in could easily house the golden ticket candidates that will tour Burton’s chocolate factory or the family that would eventually house Edward Scissorhands. The movie’s bombastic score would be the first of Burton’s many collaborations with Danny Elfman, bringing a sense of impending doom to a character who seems otherwise almost over-cheerful. The darkness is all there, even if the visuals remain bright. The fun of the picture comes just as much from Burton’s deft handling of comedic and macabre timing as Reuben’s imagination and delivery. Without Pee-Wee, we would not have Tim Burton as we know him, and vice versa.
Thus began Burton’s original dream run, where all of his greatest hits happened. Burton first signed on to a script originally entitled House Ghosts before the director made the switch to naming the picture after one of the film’s side characters. Let’s try not to say it thrice. Premiering in 1988, Beetlejuice executed the promise of Vincent; we were finally given the Burton aesthetic fully realized in feature film form: protagonists peering through sunken pupils, black and white stripes on creatures and costumes, and ghosts with upsettingly dark implications just below their surface-level jokes. If Pee-Wee was a Burton executing another’s vision, Beetlej- I mean, this film – was Burton’s first time to fully flex what we love Burton for.
Off of that Keaton comedy came Batman (1989), and off that came, along with the superhero genre as we know it, Batman Returns (1992). Burtonified Gotham is a revelation, and inarguably no superhero film has ever painted a more poignant portrait of the place the protagonist protects post-Burton. But even more noteworthy is how Burton starts to tell the story of his career through his films. While Vincent, Pee-Wee, and Lydia Deeds may have been great surrogates for how Burton felt as a child, these are the first times his films start to reflect his feelings as an adult.
Here the director uses his outsiderness as both the motivations of Batman and his villains. One of Burton’s best moments is a cut to Bruce Wayne in Batman Returns, sitting alone in his manor, staring into the distance in a non-contemplative stupor, waiting for the Bat signal to call him into the movie. Burton amplifies that Wayne’s penchant for beating up criminals in costume is a weird passion. Society accepts it only because they can gain from it, just as Hollywood only accepts Burton’s circus aesthetics as his pictures keep being successful. Wayne, and thus Burton, could have just as easily ended up like the Penguin, an outcast that is used and abused by a system choosing to ignore how weird he is for how he could be put to use.
Between the Batmans, Burton brought to life his ultimate avatar in 1990’s Edward Scissorhands. Based on a drawing the director did as a young man, the story of the lonely, troubled, and dangerous outsider in a world desperately trying to treat him as normal is as autobiographical as Burton gets. Teaming up with Johnny Depp, who would eventually become his most well-known collaborator, Burton tells the story of someone who is only as accepted by his novelty.
In this, the director’s only time writing one of his own features, we see Burton’s fear for his career. Winona Ryder’s character Kim appears as the director’s surrogate for Caroline Thompson, with whom he wrote the picture and seemed to find himself comfortable collaborating. Like Edward’s hands, Burton fears his quirks will be hated for just the same reasons they once were loved once the freshness of his oddity dims, and only a few people will remember and cherish him for who he is.
“The World’s First Fully Functioning Homicidal Artist” (1994-1999)
And yet Tim Burton continued his attempts to satisfy his hunger to be liked and accepted. Like Spielberg and Zemeckis, two filmmakers just too old to be his peers, our pale friend wished to exit the simplicity of the blockbuster success of Batman and even weirdo comedies like Beetlejuice (rats, that’s twice). He sought to earn the golden ticket of real respect through awards recognition. On the surface, his 1994 film Ed Wood could seemingly have been that ticket. The gorgeous black and white film tells the story of a quirky cross-dressing filmmaker trying to make it in Hollywood.
But by now, Burton’s taste for self-projection is at its height. Ed Wood seems to be the alternate universe doppelganger of the man behind the camera. The filmmaker, filled with quirks, assembles a variety of cast-off oddball collaborators to make films that are just horrible. The general audience scoffs at Wood’s campy science-fiction filmmaking, and he never quite fits in with the crowd. This feels like the director’s thought experiment; would he retain his passions without the success of his latest movies? With Ed Wood earning only two nominations and neither of them going to Burton, the director returned to a more typical fair.
First, he touched back on his sci-fi rerun roots with 1996’s blockbuster Mars Attacks. Then in 1999, Burton adapted Sleepy Hollow, the closest film to a full horror movie in his filmography. Both films seem influenced by Wood both behind and in front of the camera. Their ensemble casts reflect the troop Wood assembles. And they heighten comedic stylization that usually would be bad in their respective genres. Both movies are class acts in cheesy but smile-worthy overacting, fake-looking sets and silly special effects. There’s passion still in Burton’s work, even as he starts to adapt material rather than telling his usual outsider story. Here there doesn’t seem to be Burton’s usual surrogate in one character alone. Instead, a few oddball characters in an ensemble come together in both films to stop a great evil from beyond.
This era is certainly the shortest in the director’s career, but it’s perhaps the most interesting. Now the pale boy has proved himself multiple times an able director, one whose films can touch a generation. His movies now no longer have the air of proving himself to Disney or Hollywood as a whole. Thematically he has more room to be focused on creating odes to his collaborators for helping him realize his out-of-the-box visions. The passion is still there, even as his story of unacceptance loses its real-life merit.
And then it all falls apart.
Corpse Director (2005-Present)
The clear point beginning Tim Burton’s downward spiral is 2001’s Planet of the Apes. For the first time, the director feels at odds with his material. He has no take on it, nothing to give it a personal feeling. Elfman’s 2001: A Space Odyssey-inspired score and the ape’s makeup are flawless in their fields. Unfortunately, the movie is, as a whole, lifeless and nearly unwatchable. This film is notable for being where Burton met his soon-to-be collaborator and wife, Helena Bonham Carter. By now, too, the movie his name is most closely associated with (even without Burton directing a frame), The Nightmare Before Christmas, is reaching its cultural peak, and the money and the credit start rolling in. Just as the director seems to have little left in the tank, he seems to suddenly feel happy and accepted, which turns to complacency in his work.
That’s not to say every movie from here on out is awful or even fully content. Burton would take two more swings at the Oscar pitch with 2003’s Big Fish and 2014’s Big Eyes. These two very flawed but decent pictures are set to fill typical awards slots, even with their oddities. But neither truly touched audiences, partially because it seems the studios have given up on pushing the dark-haired ghost of a filmmaker into the spotlight. He’s no longer connecting to the zeitgeist of postmodern darkness that the 90s crowd enjoyed. While still dark, there’s something pleasant about both pictures and their simple but strong-willed protagonists. Burton never figures out what to do with their arcs as a whole except to make their stories fantastical.
The 2000s-2010s Tim Burton adaptations appear unmade; the director gives up before he starts. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2005), Corpse Bride (2005), Sweeney Todd (2007), Alice in Wonderland (2010), Dark Shadows (2012), Frankenweenie (2012), Miss Peregrines Home for Peculiar Children (2016), and Dumbo (2019) all telegraph that a studio has told Burton to come in and slab a thick coat of quirks and stripes on pretty terrible screenplays. Sweeney Todd is the only fully redeemable of the bunch, as Burton once more seems passionate about his material. With some of the old macabre charm and peppy cinematography, it’s a shame the film is overwrought with dated effects.
While an obvious knock against Tim Burton, the obsession with leaving his set dressing to computer effects ruins his reputation, and his wonderland, chocolate factory, the world of the dead, and peculiar children’s home seem drearily unfinished. None are as fully realized as Pee-Wee’s Rube Goldberg kitchen, the Deed’s avant-garde dining room, or Ed Wood’s cardboard studio. The director starts letting the CGI dictate the narrative and look of his movies. His typical designs take shape via computer in both live-action and these first two stop-motion films.
The latter category could have injected new life into the animation director far from home. Instead, both movies have basic Burton archetypes rendered in stiff robotics-based stop motion. Some even claim he deserves less credit than he gets for Corpse Bride. Co-director Mike Johnson struggled to speak about how much his more famous partner truly contributed to the animated picture day-to-day.
Although robotic stop motion and bland, outdated special effects are easy to point to, they’re symptoms of a larger issue. The core problem with every one of these pictures is their lack of heart. Sweeney aside, every adaptation has the energy of obligation rather than passion. Burton does each one because it’s the kind of thing he thinks he should be doing rather than something he genuinely wishes to explore in his style. For the stink of this era alone, it’s difficult to categorize Tim Burton as one of the greats. While his original run is one most young directors would kill for, his work was always best as outsider art. Bringing him into the comforts of acceptance killed whatever original spark he had. He is now left doing a pale imitation of himself.
Looking forward, it’s hard to imagine Tim Burton having another era where he pushes his limits. Since he’ll be returning to old material this year, one can only hope he’s ready to turn it around. But with his recent laziness, it’s difficult to imagine a director who would be more happy to turn his aesthetics to simple AI prompts. We’ll just have to see with his upcoming film, Beetlejuice 2. (Darn, I said it three times, didn’t I?)
