Direct Conversations: The Animated Films of Tim Burton (Foreword by Tim Burton). Tim Lammers
Direct Conversations:
The Animated Films of Tim Burton
(Foreword by Tim Burton)
by
Tim Lammers
foreword by
Tim Burton
Copyright 2013 Tim Lammers, DirectConversations.com
All rights reserved.
Published in eBook format by eBookIt.com
ISBN-13: 978-1-4566-2084-4
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the author. The only exception is by a reviewer, who may quote short excerpts in a review.
Cover Photo: © Leah Gallo
Cover Design: Holly Kempf
Editorial Director: Constance Carlson
Author’s Note: Most of the quotes in this book are taken directly from articles I wrote for Internet Broadcasting, St. Paul, Minnesota, or for TimLammers.com/StrictlyCinema.com, for which I hold the copyright. Select copyrighted material is used with written permission from Internet Broadcasting. Additional interview material that previously did not appear in print is also copyrighted by TimLammers.com/StrictlyCinema.com.
For Patty, Dalton, Cleo, Quinn, and Laine
Foreword
I started my career in cell animation and have since utilized both stop-motion and computer animation. I appreciate all forms—each has its advantages. I have a special place in my heart, however, for stop-motion. There's something about the dimension, texture and physical armatures that I've always loved. It's a visceral, tangible experience. It's a field that often gets overlooked and that I hope will continue to exist. I'm happy that a respected journalist like Tim Lammers is an advocate of the medium. It will be people like him, as much as directors and filmmakers, who will help keep the art form alive.
—Tim Burton
London, November 2013
Chapter One: The Girl with Blue Hair
The time was February 2006, when after various inquiries over the years, I finally landed an interview with Tim Burton. While not completely press shy, the filmmaker—easily one of most influential artists of our times—is hard to pin down, unless you can catch him somewhere in the press gauntlet before his films are released. Even when he's nominated for an Oscar, like he was for directing two of his stop-motion films, the opportunities are few.
But this time around, thanks to a dear friend of mine at Warner Bros., the time had come. Burton was doing a few press calls to talk about Corpse Bride—technically his first turn as a director of a stop-motion feature, even though his influences were all over the Henry Selick-helmed The Nightmare Before Christmas thirteen years earlier. A beautifully staged Gothic romantic tale co-directed by Burton and filmmaker Mike Johnson, Corpse Bride was up for a Best Animated Feature Oscar.
The wonderful thing I immediately sensed while talking with Burton was that he wasn't feigning any modesty. He never once said "it's just an honor to be nominated," nor was he serving up any thoughtless sound bites to pass the time. That's because Corpse Bride, like all of Burton's films, clearly has deep meaning to him. Making the film wasn't about being nominated or winning awards but putting forth the possibility that it would somehow resonate with viewers on an emotional level.
For me, the impact of Corpse Bride had everything to do with my then ten-year-old daughter, Cleo, who was sparked with an idea as our family screened the film in September 2005. Cleo was so taken by the beauty of the Corpse Bride that she made a commitment to dress up as the doomed lady-in-waiting for Halloween 2006 (she’d already settled on a costume for the following month).
So, thrilled knowing what the film meant to my daughter, the word of her plans was how I kicked off my first conversation with Tim Burton.
"See, that's amazing to me. I love hearing those kinds of stories because they are coming from people's hearts instead of some other place," Burton told me with a humble sense of appreciation, before adding with a laugh, "As long as she doesn't get permanent blue hair she'll be okay."
Apart from the satisfaction of knowing the impact his work had on viewers, Burton said if he felt anything about the Oscar nomination it was a validation of sorts that the teetering art of stop-motion animation would live to see another day. He hoped—just hoped—that the nomination and the recognition it brought to stop-motion would inspire more artists to get into the field instead of taking the route into the ever-burgeoning field of computer animation.
"That's why it took so long between Nightmare and this film—finding the right group of people and getting the right group of animators together," Burton recalled of the thirteen-year stretch between the production of Nightmare and Corpse Bride. "A lot of the people who did stop-motion went off into the computer field. They're getting more and more rare, so it was really nice that there was some recognition of this type of medium because it throws it a lifeline a little bit and makes it more possible for a few more stop-motion projects."
The miracle of Corpse Bride was that it was made in part because The Nightmare Before Christmas wasn't exactly a blockbuster hit out of the gate when it debuted on October 29, 1993.
Thankfully, the nineties was still in the era where films weren't left for dead after a week or two by studios because they didn't debut at the top of the box office (a discussion for another day—how films are measured in the media by how much cash they rake in during opening weekend and not artistic value, no matter the disproportionate numbers of the screens they open on). Instead Nightmare was released in a time where it gained just enough momentum to develop a cult following.
In fact, the film's following, spurred by the film's merchandising of hero and heroine of the film, Jack Skellington and Sally, along with a plethora of other characters, essentially made Corpse Bride an easier sell.
"The thing about both this and Nightmare was that they weren't large-budgeted films to begin with, so that always makes it a bit easier to get done. Nightmare had sort of a strange effect. It was semi-well received when it came out. It did okay but is a movie that has gotten more of a life as it has gone on," Burton explained.
"So, what really wasn't necessarily a major success sort of had the perception of being successful a few years later, which I think made it a little easier for Corpse Bride. It did have an impact—and I'll take what I can get," Burton added with a laugh.
Burton has often been labeled as "quirky" over the years, and given the exteriors of his original characters it's easy to see why. Whether it be Edward Scissorhands, Ed Wood or Victor Van Dort, or new takes on existing creations such as Willy Wonka, Sweeney Todd, and Barnabas Collins, the characters in Burton's films definitely march to the beat of their different drummer, most often lockstep with Burton's frequent collaborator, Johnny Depp.
But while Burton's characters stand a band apart and their looks are unique, the filmmaker is not indifferent to what his characters, and ultimately, all human beings, feel inside: the incontrovertible sense of isolation and loneliness, the longing for acceptance, and, in the case of Corpse Bride, the yearning for love in the wake of an event turned tragic. The difference with the film, of course, is that the love in question involves one person who's alive and another who's dead.
Essentially, Corpse Bride epitomizes why Burton's films are so unique: The atmosphere is fantastical in nature yet doesn't feel the need to be rifling off eye-popping effects every waking second to keep our attention. It manages to entertain, to be sure, and also has the ability to hit viewers on a deeper level.
"One of the things that we felt that we