Case Study: Tim Burton

Tim Burton

Tim Walter Burton (1958) is a film director and producer. His short film "Stalk Of The Celery Monster" shot him to fame, the film attracted attention from Walt Disney Animation Productions. Walt Disney offered him an apprenticeship for three years. While he was working for Walt Disney he worked on films like Tron and The Fox and the Hound. After a while he became bored with Walt Disney and began to work on solo projects because his style clashed with their style of animation. One of early films was a six minute stop motion animation called 'Vincent'. Walt Disney loved this short clip that much they gave him funding to remake this little film. He then had enough money to have his favourite voice actor feature 'Vincent Price' this is why he named the animation Vincent. 

One of his recent animations was inspired by Vincent is a remake of Frankenweenie released in 2012. The first version of Frankenweenie in 1984 was said to be "to quirky and scary for a mainstream appeal", for this reason it wasn't highly successful. However, 28 years later the same film is being re-made and re-released; the second time around the film was very successful and became one of the "best kids films of the twenty first century". This film really shows the development of animation, that in this context, Walt Disney didn't allow scary or quirky because people didn't know about horror or jump scares at the time. His second major film was The Nightmare Before Christmas which Tim Burton write and produced the film. It was said that this film helped generate a new interest in stop motion animation. The film was in production for three years because each character had over 7,000 clay animated faces. I think it was good that the film was in production for so long because it was such and excellent pieces of work and i think it set the bar high for stop motion animation. Referring back to The Nightmare Before Christmas and Vincent his technique he used to create the films was Clay models. Using clay is a very tedious process because it clay back then would melt under certain temps, so this made it harder for Tim because he would have to remodel it and this was very time consuming for him. Using clay you could show a lot of expression because you can manipulate it to hold its shape, the down side to this for every little movement of the face or the body you would have to create a new model for the expression/movement. So you can end up with a lot of clay heads. Tim Burton made all of the figures himself and it taken over 8 months  just to make three main characters: Jack, Sally, Oogie Boogie because they was the most complex. Its a lot easier to create a new head instead of moving the expression on the existing clay model and also you may need to re-film that expression again and it impossible to get the same expression twice, so you see how this leads up to having loads of clay models just for one character. One the other hand, Burton also used puppets in Mars Attacks, he used puppets to make the film look realistic while using real life actors. He made the puppets from a combination of plastic and wood or even what ever he had handy at the time. So it was a lot like The Nightmare Before Christmas he had a series of alien heads in his workshop with different expressions. George Pal had used this technique in his 1940's hit cartoons Puppetoons. This influenced Tim Burton in the making of Mars Attacks because George Pal was  also very interested in dinosaurs, monsters, and aliens, as evidenced by his films The War of the Worlds and The Time Machine. This latter film was based around an english man traveling into the future by a time machine. Both of these films was based on novels by H.G Wells. George Pal was heavily influenced by H.G Wells because he Pal went on to create his most famous work. Not only was Tim Burton Inspired by George Pal he was also Influenced by Ray Harryhausen. Harryhausen used a lot of dark subjects in his films, they was always monsters and dinosaurs and if you look at Tim Burtons work today they have a similar kind of tone because Burton comes up with these dark almost sinister story lines and characters i.e Corpse Bride. The setting and the mood of the film is dark but Burton does it in such a way that we become to love the characters he creates no matter if they are dead or sown back together. Tim Burton has also be an Inspiration on other Film directors such as Henry Selick. Henry Selick worked with Tim Burton on Nightmare Before Christmas and became aware of the technique that Burton used. Henry Selick went on to direct the film Corline the film was in the style of Tim Burtons it had a dark storyline with the evil mother and the evil father wanting her to stay in this fantasy world and sew buttons to her eyes so she can stay in this creepy odd world. Henry used Animators clay to make his models so again another link in to Tim Burtons work because most of his characters are made from animators clay.