Tim Burton at his "Nightmare Before Christmas" premierA dark and misty night begins once again. The giant monolithic building towers above the rest of the city calling on the end of another day. A tall dark and mysterious figure stands with his back to the wall. Black leather clings to his arms; two large black boots hang on his feet. He is alone. No one knows his name; no one knows how he feels inside; no one cares for him. Society has thrown him aside. He can never again be one of them. This is the world of Timothy William Burton.
"I grew up watching things like The Brain that Wouldn't Die on Saturday afternoon television. There's a guy with his arm ripped off and blood smeared all over the wall…I never saw it as negative. I find that stuff, when it's not rooted in reality, to be cathartic."- Tim Burton
Tim William Burton, born in August 25th 1958, is a Golden Globe Award-winning American film director, producer, and writer. He is most famous for his dark and often quirky themes, as seen in his cult classics Edward Scissorhands and The Nightmare Before Christmas, as well as his reinvention of the Batman film series. Since directing his first feature film Pee-wee's Big Adventure in 1985, he has gone on to direct and produce numerous films, many of which have received Academy Award nominations and wins. According to what people see in Burton's movies, the creepy, dark, freaky characters, it is said that Tim Burton did not have such a normal childhood at all.
Tim Burton has revealed his parents bricked up his windows as a child.The eccentric gothic filmmaker - whose hit films include 'Edward Scissorhands, 'The Corpse Bride', 'Big Fish' and 'Charlie and the Chocolate Factory' - had to climb up to look at the world through a tiny slit as a young boy. Burton, 49, told Australian newspaper The Age: "I had two windows that looked out to the lawn. For some reason my parents walled them up and gave me this little slit window that I had to climb up on my desk to see out of. To this day I never asked them why."
In 1979, Tim Burton was hired by Disney as an animator his first project being The Fox and the Hound.This did not really inspire him.Disney realized that they were not totally utilizing his talents so they made him a conceptual artist where he worked on creating characters for films.He did early work on The Black Cauldron, but was working on ideas for his personal projects, one of which later became The Nightmare Before Christmas.
One of several short stories written and illustrated by Tim Burton
Voodoo Girl
and she's all sewn apart
and she has many colored pins
sticking out of her heart.
She has many different zombies
who are deeply in her trance.
She even has a zombie
who was originally from
But she knows she has a curse on her,
a curse she cannot win.
For if someone gets
too close to her,
the pins stick farther in.
Tim Burton
Text made for "Vincent", Tim Burton's earliest film
Vincent Malloy is seven years old,
He's always polite and does what he's told.
He doesn't mind living with his sister, dog and cat,
Though he'd rather share a home with spiders and bats.
There he could reflect on the horrors he's invented,
And wander dark hallways alone and tormented.
Vincent is nice when his aunt comes to see him,
But imagines dipping her in wax for his wax museum.
He likes to experiment on his dog Abacrombie,
In the hopes of creating a horrible zombie.
So he and his horrible zombie dog,
Could go searching for victims in the London fog.
His thoughts aren't only of ghoulish crime,
He likes to paint and read to pass the time.
While other kids read books like Go Jane Go,
Vincent's favorite author is Edgar Allen Poe.
One night while reading a gruesome tale,
He read a passage that made him turn pale.
Such horrible news he could not survive,
For his beautiful wife had been buried alive.
His mother sent Vincent off to his room,
He knew he'd been banished to the tower of doom.
Where he was sentenced to spend the rest of his life,
Alone with a portrait of his beautiful wife.
While alone and insane, encased in his tomb,
Vincent's mother suddenly burst into the room.
"If you want to you can go outside and play.
It's sunny outside and a beautiful day."
Vincent tried to talk, but he just couldn't speak,
The years of isolation had made him quite weak.
Tim Burton
Tim Burton and his sketches
If you want to understand Tim Burton, you have to examine the strange spidery drawings he has been doing ever since he was a boy.
One of the most pleasing and, of course, most instantly obvious features of Tim Burton's drawings is how closely they resemble their creator. His sketches are a lifetime's work - largely produced in the planning of each of his films - and the physical similarity is unmistakable. From his earliest short film, Vincent, through Beetlejuice, Edward Scissorhands and his most recent production, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, they share his sad, charcoal-crusted eyes, attenuated bodies and hair that his long-term collaborator Johnny Depp once said expresses "much more than last night's pillow struggle". But emotionally, too: Burton's sketches all have something of the boyish lost soul, the baffled outsider to them, usually in their gloomily sloping-down eyes, or their slumped stance. Or maybe it's their all-black outfits, a uniform that
To look from Burton to his drawings is like looking at an Escher drawing, as if the artist had simply reached around and drawn himself - or, more simply, that his stories are about him. It is more difficult to avoid such connections when meeting Burton in person: at first, he is all awkward jerks, plucking at his sleeve (black, of course), tugging at his scrag of hair as if hoping to pull his conversation out of his scalp and barely able to say whether he'd like still or sparkling water. But he soon becomes easy and light, with a childlike smile. Like his drawings - and his movies - there is an awkward, slightly nervy outer coating that belies a sweet, gentle centre.
We look through sketches for his earlier films together, which he surprises himself by enjoying after initially hiding his eyes from them. I ask if he will draw a picture of his original image of Willy Wonka and, encouraged by his pleasure in the earlier drawings, he eagerly agrees, quickly sketching out a simple line figure that, true to form, bears a distinct resemblance to its artist. Thinking this would be the natural next step, I ask him to draw a portrait of himself, seeing as he seems to have been doing it all his life. Yet he literally jumps backwards into the couch and draws his legs underneath him, as if trying to disappear his ebony figure into the ivory upholstery: "No, no, no, nooooooo. That's the thing, people say."Like, I know that people say Scissorhands is slightly biographical but if I think about it too closely I get freaked out. It's weird; I need to feel connected but also distanced. That's why I don't write a lot."
- Hadley Freeman-
Latest Tim Burton film "9"
The character "9"
The character "9" 9 is a computer animated film produced by Tim Burton and Timur Bekmambetov best know for Wanted and Nightwatch. There is something special with Tim Burton, everything he does has a uniqueness all his own, and the 9 movie is no different. Even though Tim Burton is not directing 9, but only producing, the feel of the film just screams his name. If the trailer was all I had to go on and had no information about who made it, I would just know.
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