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BURTON, TIM (1958– ). American director and producer.
Directed:
Hansel and Gretel (tv movie) (1982); Frankenweenie (short)
(and provided idea) (1984); "The Jar" (1985), episode of Alfred
Hitchcock Presents; Pee Wee's Big Adventure (and appeared in,
uncredited) (1986); "Aladdin and His Wonderful Lamp" (1986),
episode of Faerie Tale Theatre; Beetle Juice (1988); Batman
(1989); Sleepy Hollow (1999); Planet of the Apes (2001); Big
Fish (2003); Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2005); Sweeney
Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (2007); Alice in Wonderland
(2010).
Directed
and produced: Luau (wrote and directed, both with David Rees) (and
appeared in and animator) (1982); Edward Scissorhands (and story with
Caroline Thompson) (1990); Batman Returns (1991); Ed Wood
(1994); Mars Attacks! (1996); The Corpse Bride (animated) (and
created characters) (2005).
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).; Lost in Oz (tv movie) (and story)
(Michael Katleman 2000); 9 (animated) (Shane Acker 2009).
Animator:
The Fox and the Hound (uncredited) (Ted Berman, Richard Rich, and Art
Stevens 1981); Tron (uncredited) (Steven LISBERGER 1982); The Black
Cauldron (uncredited) (Ted Berman and Richard Rich 1985); "The
Family Dog" (1987), episode of Amazing Stories.
Appeared
in: The Muppet Movie (James Frawley 1979); numerous documentaries.
Burton
reminds me of playwright Anton Chekhov, who believed that he was writing
comedies and couldn't understand why audiences silently watched 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, in mounting his own projects, 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 as an animator,
creating his own short films and making uncredited contributions to Walt Disney
animated films, which might explain his abiding interest in the unreal. But soon,
the studio allowed him to make 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 sweetly sentimental story of
a young suburban lad who stitches together and electrically reanimates his dead
dog, who eventually saves the day and is 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 genuinely shocked when the film board
refused to give this story a G rating. However, knowing that Burton could
persuade market-savvy Disney executives to finance 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 hardly an
insignificant skill.
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 Beetle Juice,
and its success made Burton seem like a rising star.
With two hits under his belt, and a visible
flair for the outré, Burton was logocially regarded by producers as the ideal
director for a long-planned revival of Batman—but surprisingly, they
were wrong. For whatever demons lurk in the tormented soul of Bruce Wayne, they
bear no relationship to the demons haunting Tim Burton, and the director 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 drew audiences to the theatre. But lightning didn't strike
twice when the combined energies of Danny DeVito and Michelle Pfeiffer couldn't
compensate for Nicholson's absence in Batman Returns, leading Burton to wisely abandon the series to 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 never 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 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 temporarily ended Burton's adventures in animation. (Later,
he would try directing an animated movie himself—The Corpse
Bride—with slightly more success.) 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.
As if humbled by these flops, Burton then launched
what has become the least interesting stage of his career, refashioning himself
as a journeyman hitmaker, ready to take on any project that could afford his
hefty salary; thus, for the next decade, Burton would primarily be realizing
other people's visions, not his own, although the films that sought his
services predictably tend to be a bit strange anyway, creating an illusion of
continuity in his oeuvre. Sleepy Hollow, while everything that a
big-budget special-effects popcorn movie should be, was 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 didn't receive the Academy Award nominations they deserve. Still,
any sense that Burton might have a special talent to elicit good performances
was dissipated when, after a brief return to familiar territory with Big
Fish, he could never quite get a handle on two adaptations, Charlie and
the Chocolate Factory and Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street,
and he ended up presiding over two of Johnny DEPP's least satisfactory
performances. Alice in Wonderland, really, was no better, but special
effects and effective marketing did contrive to make it a huge financial
success, already ranked one of the ten most profitable films ever made.
Now, with his vaults presumably filled with
sufficient money to sustain him for decades to come, there are signs that
Burton might be returning to the sorts of idiosyncratic oddities that once defined his
career; for he is now hard at work on a big-budget
remake of—of all things—Frankenweenie.
Clearly, this will be a film made for the people who remain determined to
figure out Tim Burton, who will eagerly seek out the ample amounts of
provocative new evidence it will provide; but people with other priorities, who
simply want to be entertained, will be well advised to stay away, as yet
another Burton monster is brought to life.
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