The revivified Frankenweenie makes his way to the cinemas this October |
Dark, disturbing and deliciously comic, Celery Monster showcased Burton's emerging distinctive style |
Though only images and fragments of the film remain extant, the influence of German expressionist cinema and Universal Pictures monster movies is clear in Burton's surreal aesthetic. Shadows leap in points, architecture and design has a touch of the European art nouveau and the characters are irrefutably ghoulish. Burton's film caused quite a stir, and soon caught the eye of Disney Animation Studios, who rapidly hired Burton as an apprentice animator. He cut his teeth at Disney creating story-boards and concept art for a number of their less successful early 80's animations, but it was with his first solo film, 1982's animated short Vincent that Burton was able to indulge his passion for gothic horror and his admiration for stop motion animation and its potential to realize the playful yet unsettling aesthetic of his pencil drawings. Though Celery Monster had been successful in capturing some of the scratchy, nightmarish intensity of Burton's drawing style, the slightly jerky, marionette-like quality of stop-motion, suggestive of the early days of silent cinema and the expressionist horrors of F.W. Murnau's Nosferatu or Robert Weine's Cabinet of Dr. Caligari gave Vincent an instantly recognizable yet utterly fresh aesthetic.
Vincent is haunted by animated visions from Burton's twisted imagination |
Adapted from one of Burton's own poems, Vincent was originally intended as a children's book, however the director was afforded a modest budget to create the short film, and in many ways the aesthetic which he established in it would come to define much of his work through the 1980's and beyond. Though Burton's next film, the original live-action Frankenweenie was judged a money-wasting flop by Disney executives and led to Burton's firing, he was soon to return to a wilder visual style with the major cinematic hits Pee-Wee's Big Adventure and Beetlejuice.
The original Frankenweenie has gained something of a cult following despite a disastrous initial reception |
The stop-motion sand worm strikes in Beetlejuice |
The success of these two films, both critical and commercial, reinvigorated major studio interest in Burton, and he went on to direct two blockbuster Batman films and the surprise smash-hit Edward Scissorhands, an elegiac gothic romance which saw Burton's dark aesthetic clash brilliantly against the pastel and picket-fence world of American suburbia. It was in the writing and production of Disney's A Nightmare Before Christmas, however, that Burton would return to stop-motion animation in a film which was to become his trade-mark. Part Christmas-film, part Halloween-horror, part-musical and all rendered in exquisite stop-motion, Burton's film was practically a love-letter to the medium, and is often credited with sparking a major resurgence of interest in its potential for film-makers and advertisers.
Henry Selick and Tim Burton with the set of A Nightmare Before Christmas |
The story of the King of Halloween's bungled attempts to try his hand at Santa's role, it involved the use of highly stylized puppets, performing against a backdrop composed of the twisted hills and spiked gratings of Burton's idiosyncratic drawing style. Burton chose this style of animation partially to reference the American favourite Rankin/Bass Productions, whose holiday specials included stop-motion renditions of classic stories such as The Little Drummer Boy. This gave the film a direct relevance to those audiences which had grown up watching these classic Christmas treats, and made Burton's subversion of Holiday iconography all the more delicious.
Still from Rankin/Bass's Little Drummer Boy, a far-cry from the twisted world of Jack and Sally |
There was a cameo for Jack Skellington in Burton's next stop-motion animation, James and the Giant Peach |
Burton chose a more muted and cold aesthetic for Corpse Bride, demonstrating the flexibility of stop-motion and its ability to achieve a variety of tones |
As well as proving one of Hollywood's most bankable directors, with a slew of box-office smashes and oodles of critical acclaim to his credit, Tim Burton is also worthy of respect for his constant and vocal championing of the magic of stop-motion and other hand-animation techniques. Time-consuming, labour-intensive and often expensive, these could easily have fallen from fashion and from the radars of major studios had they not boasted such a credible and imaginative advocate.
- Stewart Pringle
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