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(1958– ). American director and producer.
Produced: Beetlejuice (and developed) (animated
tv series) (1989); The Family Dog (animated tv series) (1993); Tim
Burton's The Nightmare before Christmas (animated) (and story and
production design) (Henry Selick 1993); Batman Forever (Joel SCHUMACHER
1995); James and the Giant Peach (animated) (Selick) (1996).
Animator: The Fox and the Hound (uncredited)
(Ted Berman, Richard Rich, and Art Stevens 1981); Tron (uncredited)
(Steven LISBERGER 1982); The Black Cauldron (uncredited) (Berman and
Rich 1985); "The Family Dog" (1987), episode of Amazing Stories.
Appeared in: A Century of Cinema (documentary)
(Caroline Thomas 1994).
Tim Burton
reminds me of playwright Anton Chekhov, who believed that he was writing
comedies and couldn't understand why audiences silently studied his dramas with
serious expressions when they should have been rolling in the aisles, convulsed
with hysterical laughter. He is not necessarily an artist in Chekhov's league,
but Burton shares with him the quality of failing to see his works in the ways
that other people see them. Manifestly, he believes that he is crafting gently
amusing, charming, and heart-warming fables for our times, not repellent
grotesqueries, and he is baffled whenever people are appalled and alienated by
what he puts on the screen.
The saga
begins with Burton toiling as an animator for Walt Disney Studios, for which he
produced two short films, the animated Vincent and the live-action
Frankenweenie—the extraordinary work where any probing exegesis of the Burton filmography
must begin. The sweet, sentimental story of a young suburban lad who stitches
together and electrically reanimates his dead dog, to eventually save the day
and be happily reconciled with his family, Frankenweenie is a deeply
disturbing film, not in the ways that great films should be disturbing in
challenging traditional values, but rather in that one watches the film and
keeps thinking, "What on Earth was the director thinking?" Burton was of course
shocked when the film board refused to give it a G rating. Still, knowing that
Burton could persuade Disney executives to pay for this travesty provides an
important clue in any effort to figure out his career: he must be one of the
most stunningly effective pitchmen in the business. And, in an era where
getting your project financed is 90% of the game, this is not an insignificant
talent.
Frankenweenie
convinced Paul Reubens, better known as Pee Wee Herman, that Burton would be
the perfect director for his first feature-length film—and surprisingly, he
was right. The appealingly childlike and already established Pee Wee character
imposed a sense of cohesiveness on what would emerge as Burton's
characteristically scattershot approach, making Pee Wee's Big Adventure
one of his best films. Burton was then blessed with a delightful script and
talented cast for the offbeat ghost story Beetlejuice, whose deserved
success made Burton seem like a rising star.
With a visible flair for the outré, Burton was next regarded by producers
as the ideal director for a long-planned revival of Batman—but surprisingly, they were wrong. Whatever demons lurk in the tormented
soul of Bruce Wayne, they bear no relationship to the demons haunting
Tim Burton, and he found himself unable to settle upon a coherent
approach to the story. Eventually, Michael KEATON decided to play
it straight, while Jack NICHOLSON decided
to play it for laughs, and the frenetic energy of the latter's performance
somehow overwhelmed the film's flaws and made it a huge hit. But lightning
didn't strike twice when Danny DeVito and Michelle Pfeiffer combined
couldn't compensate for Nicholson's absence in Batman Returns,
leading Burton to wisely abandon the series to the even less capable
hands of Joel SCHUMACHER.
In between Batman
movies, Burton produced Edward Scissorhands, surely his most personal
film, and another resonant resource for anyone seeking to analyze this director.
Unfortunately, despite several determined efforts, I can't bring myself to sit
through it. I suppose my visceral repulsion is related to my reaction to Tod
BROWNING's Freaks, but the actors there were at least real freaks whose
plight genuinely commanded attention. The contrived plight of a hapless freak
created by the special effects department, I find, is far less compelling.
Long on a roll, Burton in the early 1990s began to stumble, both
as a producer and director. A stop-motion animation project, Tim
Burton's The Nightmare before Christmas, was tolerable as children's
fare but far more popular than it deserved to be, its true quality
better suggested by the embarrassing failure of the follow-up film
James and the Giant Peach, which ended Burton's adventures
in animation. Two other big bombs ensued: Ed Wood, like Frankenweenie,
numbly applied a traditional Hollywood formula—here, the celebratory
biopic—to the utterly inappropriate topic of inept filmmaker Edward
D. WOOD, Jr., and fell apart as soon as Martin
LANDAU's fascinating portrayal of am aging
Bela LUGOSI came to an end. And Mars Attacks!
episodically visualized an old series of farcical trading cards with
a reverence normally reserved for biblical adaptations, leading to
the worst sort of funny film that isn't really funny.
Humbled by
these flops, Burton has now embarked upon the least interesting stage of his
career, striving to refashion himself as a reliable mainstream hitmaker. The
first sign of his change in attitude, Sleepy Hollow, was everything that
a big-budget special-effects popcorn movie should be, yet it was also
stunningly anonymous—any one of a dozen directors in Hollywood might have
made it. More impressive was Burton's Planet of the Apes, a clever
reworking of the original story ultimately spoiled by a touch of the old Tim
Burton in its utterly senseless, unpleasant, and incongruous concluding scene.
Still, for most of its length, it is an involving narrative dominated by the
hypnotically compelling performances of the ape-masked Helena Bonham Carter and
Tim Roth, two actors who aren't going to receive the Academy Award nominations
they deserve. And we stumble upon any bit of important data: whether because of
his engaging personality or brilliant instructions on the set, he is
consistently capable of inspiring his performers to remarkable heights.
Should the
doggedly eccentric and playful Tim Burton, then, finally be embraced as an
actor's director, best suited for grittily realistic, John Cassavetes-like
probings of everyday people facing domestic crises? It would be the strangest
turn yet in a career already distinguished by its strangeness. But in pondering
the future of the inexplicable Tim Burton, absolutely nothing can be ruled out.
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