Tim Burton’s World of Wonderful, Weird and Wildly Entertaining

Tim Burton films are unmistakable different, some might even say weird, yet they are always wildly entertaining to some degree and his latest, Alice in Wonderland, due to release on Friday, March 5 will not disappoint true Burton fans.

It would not surprise anyone that little Tim was not an ordinary child. He was born in Burbank, California to a former baseball player and a mother who worked i n a gift shop. He was not very good in school and often made his own films in the back yard using an 8 mm camera and crudely concocted stop-action animation procedures. He enjoyed monster flicks such as Godzilla and loved the ghoulish and passionately peculiar actor Vincent Price.

Burton was fortunate enough to work with the tall and lanky actor Price before he passed away. Burton wrote, filmed and directed a short film in 1982 entitled Vincent, an adaptation of a poem of the same name. Price provided the narration and Rick Heinrichs produced the six minute black and white. Heinrichs and Burton had met at Disney Studios while Burton worked there after he graduated form the California Institute of Art. This short was shown at the Chicago Film Festival along with a teen drama Tex for a limited engagement of only two weeks at a Los Angeles theatre. Burton went on to produce several other shorts including a Hansel and Gretel Japanese themed film and Frankenweenie which stared Shelly Duvall.

Burton’s big break came when Paul Rubens, aka Pee Wee Herman, asked him to direct his Pee Wee Herman’s Big Top Adventure movie. Burton whet on to produce the low budget yet extremely popular Beetlejuice starting Michael Keaton, Geena Davis, Winona Ryder and Alec Baldwin. His next film was a traditional film in the sense that is was linier and did not stray into the weird or morbid. Batman featured Michael Keaton as the caped crusader and Jack Nicholson as the Joker. Burton received a lot of flack over his choices for both roles but he wanted the Batman character to be an ordinary guy who dressed as a hunky superhero bat and the Joker to be a bit ‘off’ yet scary at the same time. The movie went on to become major box office ‘money’ and won an Academy Award for Best Art Direction.

Except for Batman Returns, Burton’s next several films were unmistakably Burton-esque in that they delved into the slightly off beat yet were somewhat like a train wreck in which you could not look away. Burton gained many regular fans and followers with his movies such as Edward Scissorhands, The Nightmare Before Christmas, Cabin Boy, Ed Wood, James and The Giant Peach, Mars Attacks!, Sleepy Hallow, Planet of the Apes, Big Fish, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Corpse Bride, Sweeny Todd, 9 (not to be confused with Nine) and the upcoming Alice in Wonderland.

Burton works closely with his partner, Helena Bonham Carter and his good friend, Johnny Depp on several of his movies.