130 minutes is all it takes for one person to become engrossed in a tale, to travel through the trials and tribulations, and to be able to walk away with something to talk about. Movies have always been an escape for humans to travel and walk through someone else’s eyes. Some movies are better at making people’s dreams come true or for Tim Burton making people’s nightmares come to life. Tim Burton, a filmmaker, has become extremely popular in the eyes of this generation as the kind of director that can turn a cute Disney movie into an adult phenomenon.
He’s done musicals, comedies, and even children’s movies and although all have not been a success they have made some type of important impression on the world. Tim Burton has been an influence on American society in his filmmaking career in not only producing fantastic movies, but taking original movies from a wide scope and putting a unique spin on them, and by inspiring other directors to continue his style. Tim Burton’s life is often dramatized on how he grew up and the way it influenced him because of being extremely gothic and gloomy artistic style. People often assume he had a tortured and horrible upbringing.
In reality, he felt “quite normal” although his feelings of isolation were there and extremely prominent all the way up to his adulthood (Itzkoff). He realized that those feelings are common among many kids. As for is influences, Burton loved the classic gory monster movies and pop-culture touchstones as Mad Magazine. He felt a certain lure to the hard core tales and B-movies (a low budget movie). He saw a “roughness” and a “surprising” nature in how they were more immediate than the classic movies he watched were (Burton, Tim). The lower budget ones image’s stuck in Burton’s head, although he didn’t watch them for that purpose.
The images and impressions on a young Burton’s mind, combining with a sense of abandonment from the suburban society, he developed a love to create. This love manifested in many ways be that as it may the most important was what started out as doodles and irrelevant sketches turned into an outlet from his world (Howell). Young Burton didn’t consider the drawings he made relevant until he won a contest for his drawing to be chosen as the local garbage company’s new advertising picture. When reflecting about his younger life Burton often re states that he was most likely clinically depressed and didn’t know it (Itzkoff).
Yet he makes a point that if he were to ask any kid today they probably would feel the same way he felt all those years ago. Burton branches out from doodles to attending and graduating from California Institute for the Arts or CalArts for short. He went through a questioning phase of whether or not his work was actually good to which his teachers advised that if he loved it he should “keep going” (Itzkoff). Following his graduation from the arts college Burton was hired to work at Walt Disney Pictures. He realized immediately, while drawing sketches for the movie they were doing at the time that his vision did not accompany Disney’s.
Even the head supervisors of Disney realized Burton wasn’t the traditional Disney still yet they saw promise in him (Burton, Tim). They gave him the time and space to be able to create whatever he wanted which he was more than delighted to be “locked up” in a room to work in the dark of Disney Pictures. He created a series of short films like Vincent and Frankenweenie (Hal). At the tail end of his Disney short phase, a producer of another studio approached Burton and asked if he would be directing his first feature film.
The film Pee-wee’s adventures surround a “man child” and his experiences in the world (Kehr). Although the movie did not reflect the usual connotations that come along with a Burton movie mostly being that it was a comedy. It didn’t matter that much at the time because didn’t have a real example of his style to compare it to (Burton influences). At this point in Burton’s career, he notices that filmmaking could actually be a suitable passion and goes on to produce a series of well-known and acclaimed movies at the same time he receives harsh criticizing for some of his movies (Kehr).
Burton wanted to do something new and different, so when someone approached him about taking a comic strip onto the big screen he practically jumped at the offer because he was excited to be able to take the “first attempt at a darker version of a comic book” (Itzkroff). He spun a special twist on the Batman comics and created what will later become known as the first in a series of successful comic superhero movies (Batman). Even now, the box office is filled with recent superhero movies that has its credit due to Burton.
After the overwhelming success with batman, Burton seemed to be on fire with new ideas and resources to make his ideas come alive. He produces a sequel to Batman, along with another popular movie Edward Scissorhands unlike the next movie that would “revolutionize” the movie industry in the same way Batman did was his work with The Nightmare before Christmas (How). The formulation behind nightmare was actually a coalition of old drawings that Burton had when he was younger that by using stop motion animation brought it a life (Howell). Nightmare was successful in bringing in the new and older generations to enjoy a thrilling movie.
Along with giving a foundation to the stop motion industry. Not long after Nightmare was a string of movies resembling the nature of Nightmare like Coraline. The movie Coraline actually bears a lot of similarity to Burton’s style because its own director worked exclusively with Burton on Nightmare and caught the burtonesque bug (Itzkoff). Recently, Burton decided to figuratively stab his old place of employment Walt Disney in the back by redoing one of their movies that all though was darker than the Disney interpretation was more well appreciated and even has a sequel coming out this summer.
Burton’s Alice while containing the same characters and plot as the Disney movie, takes on a whole new life by expressing an older version of Allice than the original movie (Meslow). It displays a variety of complicated special effects and amazing actors along with Johnny Depp and Burton’s own ex-wife who are both a typical scene for his movies (Kehr). Alice won several awards for makeup, production, and acting. All together, it inspired other movie makers to dive into the world of the Grimm fairy tales.
As stated earlier, the most recent influence Burton has had on the filmmaking industry is how he technically was the first director to take the Disney fairy tales and convert them into their natural Grimm’s brother’s tale and out of it began the era of “dark fairy tales” that continues to this day (Meslow). Fairy tales embody the old and the new in this generation has had the pleasure to grow up watching the Disney fairy tales, but have also been able to see the progression of dark fairy tale movies like the Huntsman and Maleficent (Meslow).
It fulfills Burton’s one dream to create work that can be enjoyed by both audiences the young and the old (Burton influences). Fairy tales play an immense role in shaping several things as character, view of the world, and view of each other. The people that grew up watching Disney movies also have been seeing the progression of the era of dark fairy tales and essentially the film industry has in a way grown with them.
With the help of Tim Burton, it’s been able to embrace its weird side and accept the dark and raw thoughts that everyone has gone through in some part of their life and been able to manifest in on the big screen. This is what people go to see, they go to feel for a second that it’s acceptable to think maybe a forest can lead to a whole other world or that a house can become alive. It allows them to indulge and feel young again, which is what everyone craves as Burton said “feeling that weird foreign quality just makes you feel more, strangely, at home” (Itzkoff).
