Tim Burton was born in 1958. After high school he attended the California Institute of the Arts. In his second year he entered the Disney animation program and in 1979, he was drafted to join the Disney animation ranks. In his early years Burton worked on The Fox and the Hounds and The Black Cauldron as an illustrator. But Disney recognised that its movies were too formulaic for the particular talents of Burton and set him loose on his own projects. Years later we can thank Disney for animated shorts like Vincent and Frankenweenie and, of course, the feature length The Nightmare Before Christmas.
Burton is one of those rare breed of movie-makers that seem to have established a new genre of film. Unlike Woody Allen (wry humour) and Roman Polanski (contemporary alienation) it is impossible to summon up, in a nutshell, what that might be.
He started his film-making career as an animator before moving into the realm of real people but continues to make stories entrenched in fantasy. On the other hand, with the rather sad, true story of the film director Ed Wood in Ed Wood, Burton has moved outside fantasy. There is no guessing what he will do next, but let us look at what he has done.
Take The Nightmare Before Christmas. It is a landmark movie in a number of ways, being the first ever stop-motion animation and the script being based on a short story by Burton himself. It has been created as a sung-through musical with the main characters telling the story through song and musical numbers.
The plot tells the story of how Jack Skellington and other macabre characters who inhabit Halloween town kidnap Santa Claus. Jack has observed Christmas town and is intrigued by the sight of elves making toys and decorated trees. He decides to solve the mystery by creating his own Christmas. The scenes that enfold are so rich in visual jokes that it is impossible to take it in at one sitting. You simply have to see the subversions that follow; how the Halloween grotesques recreate fairy lights as strung skulls, hear the doleful rendition of ‘Jingle Bells’ played by a macabre orchestra, to see a team of skeletal reindeer pulling the sleigh laden with Jack and his gifts into the sky. And what gifts!
Anyone who can’t stand brats will love the scenes of little tykes running in terror from jack-in-the-boxes that seemingly have lives of their own, bloodied dolls and cute and cuddly pets who are not slow to show their vicious fangs and sharp teeth. Soon, the police are called to shoot down the pretend Santa Claus that flies over the suburban streets. Jack and his team return sadly to Halloween town, the real Santa is returned to Christmas town, and everything returns to normal.
Normal, that is, from a Burton point of view. The story is all at once, side-splittingly funny and achingly sad. Jack has been confronted by an enigma and, by analysing the situation incorrectly, has failed to find a place in it. I always feel that if the crossover had worked both ways, the elves of the twee, candy-coloured Christmas town had much to learn from the more organic inhabitants of Halloween town.
In Edward Scissorhands suburban streets have been created as a pastel coloured wonderland. The houses and cars have been sprayed with colours more suited to an ice-cream parlour. Inhabitants go about their staid occupations in garments that seem to have been inspired by a dress designer’s narcotic fantasy. It all creates a terrific foil for the muted tones of the gothic castle from whence the subject, Edward Scissorhands, (Johnny Depp) comes.
In spite of this extraordinary suburb, Burton never stops reminding us how ordinary are its inhabitants. The family that Edward is invited to join are called the Boggs. Peg, the mother, sells Avon and every Saturday afternoon the dads listen to the baseball on the radio while cutting hedges and trimming lawns. All the stock characters of the fictional suburb are there; gossip Marge, sex-pest Joyce and religious nut Esmeralda.
The ordinary-extraordinary tease continues as the multicoloured inhabitants entertain monochrome Edward at a summer barbeque, watch him fall foul of the law, then prepare to celebrate Christmas. In keeping with the subversion of Christmas, Edward Scissorhands parallels ‘Nightmare’ in other ways.
The suburb and the castle of Edward Scissorhands are no more real than the fantasy worlds of ‘Nightmare’. Edward views Suburbia through his strands of crows’ nest hair in the same wistful way as Jack Skellington views Christmas town. Edward has been created by an off-the-wall inventor (Vincent Price) not unlike the cartoon Evil Genius in ‘Nightmare’ who creates his own grotesque companions at will.
Edward is never comfortable with his role as the hero/villain of Suburbia who can cut hedges and hair beautifully but can also unpick locks with his scissor hands. Eventually, his fragile romance with Kim (Winona Ryder) is shattered and he flees back to his castle, pursued by a murderous crowd. And as with the end of ‘Nightmare’, I left Edward Scissorhands feeling that the parties of both worlds had much to learn from each other. I also wondered why, in both movies, does Tim Burton long to create mayhem in suburbia?
According to Mike Jackson and Arran McDermott www.timburtoncollective.com Burton was born in Burbank, which was quintessential 1950’s American suburbia, a world in which the shy, artistic Tim was not quite in step with the shiny, happy people surrounding him.
Could this be the reason why the Burton genre returns again and again to the suburb, peeling back the innocuous façade to reveal a darker facet of what is safely familiar to most of us? Could it be that Burton, like the unfortunate hero, has never been comfortable in his surroundings?
Burton’s latest movie is Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, based on the book by Roald Dahl. It is a perfect meeting of minds, Dahl being a purveyor of the same dark humour that Burton revels in. The movie has two heroes; the normal-as-apple-pie Charlie who comes from a poor family and longs for something special to happen to him and Willy Wonka (Johnny Depp) who owns the chocolate factory and has the power to change Charlie’s life. In spite of his autonomy however, Willy Wonka is a rather twisted, dysfunctional person who had been rejected by his dentist father when he revealed he wanted to make a career of selling sweets.
Again, Burton parallels are at work here. In a flashback scene, we see Willy as a child wearing a monstrous contraption on his head, devised by his father (Christopher Lee) to alter his teeth. Just like the inventor father of Edward Scissorhands, Willy's father is unable to resist tampering with nature. Willy grows up with a perfect set of teeth but with a damaged personality.
Charlie’s attachment to his own family is a puzzle to Willy and, for a time, it raises a barrier to their becoming friends. It is Charlie who finally reunites Willy with his father and shows him what has been missing from his life. Willy crosses over to a fuller life without losing his own persona in a way that Edward Scissorhands could never do. Is ‘Charlie’ Burton’s apologia for a career of scorning normality and familial happiness?
‘Nightmare’ also parallels Sleepy Hollow, Burton’s movie based on the poem by Washington Irving. Jack Skellington’s obsessive analysis of Christmas puts me in mind of the quest of detective Ichabod Crane (Johnny Depp) to find a rational explanation for the origin of the headless horseman.
Ichabod's denial of the supernatural is firmly quashed when he finally sees the headless horseman himself. Indeed, his insistence on rationality is nearly his undoing, and that of the very people he came to save. It is not a large step to see Burton, maker of fantasy movies, transposing his persona to movie characters who are quite literally forced to swallow a dollop of the supernatural in order to make sense of this life.
It is significant also that one of his movies Ed Wood, is about the film producer Ed Wood. This is Burton’s way of paying homage to another (much less successful) producer and his, Wood's, attempts at adding a dimension of fantasy to the lives of the people around him.
The movies of Tim Burton may not fall easily into any known genre but each comes wrapped about its own message. The Corpse Bride is due for release this autumn and I can’t wait to find out what Burton has to tell us next.
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