SIT ebrary resources
Advanced Art of Stop-Motion Animation
Disney tried to impose their ideologies onto Burton's work: Disney tends to portray children as docile and innocent, an idealization that Burton's aesthetic rejects. (200)
Burton's influences include movies adapted from Edgar Allan Poe, Mary Shelley, and Bram Stoker rather than the original literature. His brand of pastiche constitutes "a subjective interpretation of half-informed memory," rather than a conscious revision. This form of influence characterizes in general Burton's style. While the 1920 film the Cabinet of Dr. caligari (directed by Robert Wiene) influenced Burton's animated short Vincent, for example, he admits that he never saw the film beforehand- only posters and stills from magazines. This cursory attention to sources leads some critics to see Burton as "sloppy, suggesting that he doesn't do his homework properly to reproduce slavishly the look of his film 'models'". To counter such charges, Burton has s poken on one or two occasions about his influences, including fairy tales: .."Fairy tales, like Grimm's fairy tales, are probably closer to movies like the Brain that Wouldn't Die, much rougher, harsher, full of bizarre symbolism... I think I've always liked the idea of fairy tales or folktales, because they're symbolic of something else. There's a foundation to them, but there's more besides, they're open to interpretation... so I think I didn't like fairy tales specifically. I liked the idea of them more. (209-10)
Typically, when Burton borrows images and concepts from other films, he does so with a degree of creative interpretation that can (as mentioned before) be mistaken for sloppiness. (213)
Corpse Bride
also exemplifies a complex web of source materials. (213)
Disney tried to impose their ideologies onto Burton's work: Disney tends to portray children as docile and innocent, an idealization that Burton's aesthetic rejects. (200)
Burton's influences include movies adapted from Edgar Allan Poe, Mary Shelley, and Bram Stoker rather than the original literature. His brand of pastiche constitutes "a subjective interpretation of half-informed memory," rather than a conscious revision. This form of influence characterizes in general Burton's style. While the 1920 film the Cabinet of Dr. caligari (directed by Robert Wiene) influenced Burton's animated short Vincent, for example, he admits that he never saw the film beforehand- only posters and stills from magazines. This cursory attention to sources leads some critics to see Burton as "sloppy, suggesting that he doesn't do his homework properly to reproduce slavishly the look of his film 'models'". To counter such charges, Burton has s poken on one or two occasions about his influences, including fairy tales: .."Fairy tales, like Grimm's fairy tales, are probably closer to movies like the Brain that Wouldn't Die, much rougher, harsher, full of bizarre symbolism... I think I've always liked the idea of fairy tales or folktales, because they're symbolic of something else. There's a foundation to them, but there's more besides, they're open to interpretation... so I think I didn't like fairy tales specifically. I liked the idea of them more. (209-10)
Corpse Bride
also exemplifies a complex web of source materials. (213)
Several critics have compared Vincent to the German Expressionist film The cabinet of Dr. Caligari as well as Nosferatu-A Symphony in Terror. Burton himself described it as Dr. Caligari meets Ray Harryhausen", though the only obvious connection to Harryhausen is that the film is stop-motion.
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In the "making of" featurette on the Nightmare DVD, Henry Selick credits Burton with teh design of the main characters, the tone, and the look. He specifies that the art direction was based on what the crew thought a Tim Burton film should look like- that is, a combination of German Expressionism and Dr. Seuss."
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Englarging on the German Expressionism of Batman, Brton has incorporated some of hte hyperrealism of Edward Scissorhands the Felliniesque anarchy of Beetlejice into the film to create disparate worlds inhabited by the Three protagonists- Batman, Catwoman and the Penguin.
Traditions in World Cinema
How German Expressionism Influenced Tim Burton: A Video Essay
Stills from The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Frankenstein, and Vincent
June 23, 2015 by Ted Mills
https://vimeo.com/cinemasemlei
Cinema Sem Lei has made a nice supercut video essay that explores the influence ofGerman Expressionism on the films of Tim Burton. There’s undeniably some direct quotes: The first shot comparing the cityscapes of Metropolis and Batman Returns, the shadows on the wall of both The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and The Corpse Bride, and the similarities in the haircuts of Metropolis’ Rotwang and Christopher Walken’s Max Shreck (the name a tribute to the title actor in Nosferatu) again in Batman Returns. (Beetlejuice is notoriously absent.)
But there’s also a sense that Cinema Sem Lei’s video is cutting off a crab’s legs to make it fit in a box. Not everything in Burton’s films has a direct link to German Expressionism, and to do so is to pretend that this silent movie style lie dormant between the 1920s and 1982, when Burton created his first animated short, Vincent. (Watch it here.) It’s to ignore that Burton most likely got his Expressionism, like many other ’80s filmmakers, second and third hand.
German Expressionism didn’t result in that many films, but the ones that did have become famous for their visionary aesthetic, standing out visually and intellectually against the other films of the day. When many of its directors fled the Nazis and moved to Hollywood, the style began to influence horror movies and film noir. One other place where Expressionism popped up was in the animated films of Warner Brothers, Disney, and MGM, something Burton definitely grew up watching. The comic exaggerations in Tex Avery are nothing but expressionist, and the design of both the desert vistas of Chuck Jones’ Road Runner films, and his wild sci-fi designsbear the distortions of Caligari‘s sets.
So while we can see the angled rooftops and spindly stairs of Caligari in the shot of Burton’s Vincent sulkily climbing the stairs to his room, a more direct influence was the art of Dr. Seuss, and while a skeleton might play a bone as a flute in Murnau’sFaust, it’s Burton’s childhood love of Ray Harryhausen that you can see in the skeleton band from Corpse Bride.
Also, it’s not known when Burton may have seen these classic silent films. Growing up in the ‘70s he would have had to seek out prints, or look at stills in books about the history of horror. Once he got to CalArts to study, his access to films would have expanded beyond what was on television.
But it’s interesting that in most interviews, Burton quickly diverts the discussion if and rarely when asked about German Expressionism, but indulges when asked about what he watched as a child.
Once working in the film industry, no doubt those Burton brought on for his art directors and costume designers came with their own knowledge of history, while music videos in the early ‘80s were also awash with Expressionist influence mixed with modernist design. Not to say that Burton isn’t a singular visionary with a stack of influences, but one who had grown up lonely, he soon found himself among many who shared his particular tastes, the film production as a second family.
via Slate
The Art of Tim Burton: The Artist Before The Filmmaker R.E. Bitoun
Burton has his own style that remains inimitable and his extravagance has become very popular. He is an artist before anything else. He is a talented drawer who expresses himself through his art. With him a film is often born from a little drawing at the corner of a page. Extremely diverse and prolific, he uses different techniques and material and with this he succeeds in creating whole worlds. His characters are born on paper, marginal and touching, misunderstood and passionate, just like their creator. He drew monsters to escape conformity and find a way out. Encouraged by his art teacher, he developed his own style and started to feel a true aversion for authority and categorisation. He started to write and illustrate books for children and became a visual storyteller.
According to Rick Heinrichs, producer for Frankenweenie: "economically but sublimely drawn, they often put across one simple-but-great-idea. His narrative temperament dictates an expressionistic visual style that selectively reveals the emotional heart of his story: one that entertains without burying meaning beneath multiple layers of expository clutter and gratuitous business."
His work with Disney: his independent projects were considered too bizaree to be screened and not adapted for children. only after leaving Disney he was able to free himself from artistic constrictions and focus on his art which he developed by embracing filmmaking.
His Inspirations
People have often compared Burton’s style to the gothic. The use of black, the darkness of some of his drawings, the heavy make-up, the paleness of the skins, monsters and other ghostly creatures recall Gothic literature and paintings but also German Expressionism. The theme of death is omnipresent in Burton’s art often combined with poetry and derision. The macabre becomes comic and poetic. He finds inspiration in the authors he loves like Edgar Allan Poe and Roald Dahl. He admires them for the unconventionality of their stories and the complexity of their worlds far from being just black and white. They are both funny and dark and close to Burton’s own style.
True film buff, Burton’s inspiration can also be linked to the films he used to watch, mainly thrillers, low- budget films, satires, science fiction movies and cartoons. He identifies with Frankenstein and other monsters who are both feared and rejected. At the time he discovered those films, his universe started to expand and his creativity to grow. Watching Technicolor films helped him develop his use of colour in his drawings but also in his short films and he influence can be observed in Edward Scissorhands, with the profusion of pastel colours. He also loved punk music which expressed at the time his desire for rebellion against conventions.
His art is truly representative of his vision of the world and he also finds inspiration in the people who surround him. His drawings are often filled with social commentaries. He reveals the absurdity of our consumerist society and its hierarchical organisation. In one drawing he portrays the company Disney as a powerful dehumanizing machine which crushes any sense of singularity. He caricatures people and their behaviour from girls too obsessed by their physical appearance to a perverse man undressing a woman with his eyes, or a man covered in blood going in a gun shop and asking for more bullets. The suburbs he lived in also inspired him a lot and are at the heart of his film Edward Scissorhands.
Tim Burton refuses to become a label or a brand and doesn’t categorize his art although others did it for him. His style is very recognizable, full of whirlwinds, stripes, seams, asymmetrical figures, winding staircases, monsters with sad eyes and weird hair. In terms of colours, he often uses black, white, purple, red and sometimes bright colours too. Through his drawings he captures feelings more quickly and efficiently than through words. He bases his style on simplicity, clarity, economy and rapidity. Here is how Ian Mackinnon, puppet creator and designer for Mars Attacks!, has described Burton’s style:
‘The real strength in Tim’s artwork is his appreciation of form with strong shapes and exaggerated proportions. Within a few seemingly simple pen lines, he creates bold silhouettes […] You would be mistaken for thinking that some of Tim’s rough sketches are rudimentary, loose or naïve, for they hold vital information, demonstrate a great delicacy, sensitivity, consistent keen eye, and a stunning vision’.
Work Cited
Tim Burton – Leah Gallo – Holly C.Kempf – Derek Frey, The Art of Tim Burton- Steeles Publishing – 2009
The Imagination of Tim Burton Niamh Coghlan
Niam Coghlan for Aesthetica Magazine
Andrew Sarris in his Notes on the Auteur Theory (1962) states the auteur theory as being comprised of three parts: “The outer circle as technique; the middle circle, personal style; and the inner circle, interior meaning.” Consequently, he argues that the director thus has three roles that are interchangeable and inherently dynamic. Burton, as the director auteur, is comparable to other such directors as Eisenstein and Rossellini, but his style of filmmaking is intrinsically different for its focus on animation and the idea of the fairytale. To elaborate in simple terms; he is not just the author of the film, but the illustrator. The degree of sophistication and complexity of his films show a mastery of the three circles as described by Sarris – that of technique, personal style, and interior meaning. Edward Scissorhands, in which the young Edward (played by Johnny Depp) with hands as scissors is introduced into mainstream, suburban society, is an excellent example of this interplay. Burton’s personal style of direction and creative vision is articulated through both the story and the directorial technique. Evident throughout the film is a certain sensitivity and emotive sensibility towards the characters; Edward embodies the “different” and reflects the audience’s own fears of exclusion and ostracisation by conventional society. That Burton, as a director, can visualise and express these feelings through the cinematic process is the skill of his work and an integral part of it.
We are, for some reason, quicker to identify and relate to an illustrated character rather than an actor on screen. There is a dual sense of removal and identification: the audience sees certain familiar characteristics and themes, but is one step removed as the character is but a representation. In a sense, the audience is freed from judgement when they view an animated character articulating their fears and thoughts on a television screen or in a theatre. This is, and always has been, the appeal of the fairytale; it provides a fictional course for exploring deeper themes of evil and morality without upsetting a child’s sensitive nature. The urban psychosis of society is that we truly believe in the villains of yesteryear – Sweeney Todd is not just a myth but also a reality, and one to be fearful of at that. Burton has a storyteller’s mastery of the fairytale: he has grasped the elusive nature of the human imagination and offered a conduit into its basic, internal structure. Burton, like many of us, still believes the bogeyman exists.
Psychologically his films are quite compelling as the characters act out the stories and fears of our youth, of the adolescent compulsion to fantasize and construct elaborate “what if?” scenarios of doom. Visually his characters tend to be fractured in appearance, distorted in size, and aesthetically disturbing. Burton reflects their inner torment through their image and exaggerates those tragic qualities. The gothic is an omnipresent quality and influence in these illustrations and the work of his predecessors, artists such as Edvard Munsch, is present in much of his work. The influence of artists like the Futurists has yet to be heavily propounded upon in terms of Burton’s work. The Futurists, artists such as Giacomo Balla and Umberto Boccioni, and their obsession with the mechanics of movement and technology are paralleled in Burton’s work. His work, however, is much more sympathetic and comedic and lacks the seriousness, the gravitas, of Munsch, Balla, and Boccioni. Burton is artistically very self-aware and almost seems to mock himself, especially through his cartoons and illustrations: these works are comparable in style and structure to David Shrigley’s sharp, humorous drawings that ridicule the self-impressed art world. Burton is slightly more edgy and sophisticated; his characters taking on grotesque, freakish features redolent of expressionism, Japanese animé, and in some cases, with the emaciated body of Jack Skellington in The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993), Albrecht Dürer.
Burton was compelled to utilize stop-motion animation because it could bring something purely imagined to vivid life in a way that 2-D animation couldn’t. For his first directorial endeavor as an apprentice animator at Disney, Burton chose to film Vincent (1982) using his beloved technique, because, according to early script notes (also on view in the exhibition), it had a “crude elegance,” and the articulated movements of the puppet reflected the “totally exposed feelings” of the Vincent Malloy character, a little bored suburban boy who dreams of being a tragic mad scientist. Burton grew up enamored of Universal horror movies such as James Whale’sFrankenstein (1931). Perhaps subconsciously, he gravitated toward a technique that could help him bring monsters to life.
In 1993, Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas brought stop-motion animation back to the forefront of filmmaking. Its success proved that audiences would still respond to this age-old medium even in the face of new and wondrous computer-animated films. It perpetually amazes me to think about the process of creativity and the divergent paths it can take. Burton and John Lasseter were classmates at CalArts and colleagues in Disney’s animation department. From this similar start, while Lasseter was going to infinity and beyond withToy Story (1995), the first completely computer-animated feature film, Burton went back to the roots with stop-motion animation, which is as old as film itself.
Frankenweenie (2012)
Vincent (1982)
Nightmare Before Christmas (1993)
Corpse Bride (2009)
James and the Giant Peach (1996)
German Expressionism Influence on Horror & Film-Noir
German expressionists used shadow and highly stylized lighting, to create shadows and silhouettes
bizarre settings
Another element within the German Expressionist movement was bizarre settings. They were not based on real-life backgrounds and they were meant to appear distorted. The idea behind this was that Expressionist directors would structure scenes that represented their own disjointed mood following World War I within an atmosphere similar to a dream. In The Cabinet Of Dr. Caligari, the majority of warped settings were filmed indoors with unusual painted and stylized designs which were incorporated within the film. The uncommon backgrounds stumbled away from reality which provided an uncomfortable and menacing effect implying disorientation.
In years to come, other types of German Expressionist settings were introduced that influenced later cinematic developments. Count Orlok’s castle in Nosferatu was staged within real-life territory but still created the same menacing, uncomfortable atmosphere. This kind of setting appeared in American horror films, such as Psycho and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre(Hooper 1974). On the other hand, Metropolis provided another idea of a dysfunctional background. The film was set in an unrealistic city but was not intentionally casting a frightening reflection. This resulted in another type of peculiar setting which greatly influenced comic book adaptations and science-fiction, particularly in Blade Runner (Scott 1982) and Batman Returns (Burton 1992).
With the audience seeing a hostile, warped setting through German Expressionism and its later cinematic developments, another substantial method was the character types. Many of them in German Expressionist films had a form of physical and psychological distortion. For instance, the make-up on Cesare in The Cabinet Of Dr. Caligari was deliberately overdone, which indicates that he was an eccentric character. However, Count Orlok inNosferatu provided a more physically distorted approach. His sinister behaviour and body language were portrayed in an eerie, slow manner, which created suspense. His physical features, particularly his bold, daring eyes as well as his sharp teeth and deformed ‘claws’ formed a depth of fright which influenced future vampire-related characters.In modern cinema, Tim Burton is the one film director whose films contain elements of German Expressionism. Evidently from the unrealistic settings inBeetlejuice (Burton 1988), eerie gothic acting inEdward Scissorhands(Burton 1990), affective shades in Ed Wood (Burton 1994) and overdone make-up in Sweeney Todd(Burton 2007), German Expressionism still lives. Its high impact leaves the audience to question where cinema itself would be today if World War I had not occurred at all. Nevertheless, it may have been a supposedly short-lived era in its original country, but it became the opening link of a chain that has expanded into a legacy of filmmaking and resulted in one of the most important cinematic movements ever.
Barry Langford Film Genre: Hollywood and Beyond 2005
http://www.awn.com/mag/issue1.9/articles/frierson1.9.html
pastiche is how Burton's style is explained in this essay
Burton continues his spoof of B horror films by staging the boy's "tragedy" in a series of grandiose, melodramatic gestures underscored by frightful organ music. Simple sets, cut by expressionistic shafts of lights, give free reign to Vincent's melodramatic actions, as he plays the romantic artist, stricken with grief. Vincent digs frantically to uncover his wife's "grave," unaware that he's destroying his mother's flower bed. Burton again toys with the film's spatial and temporal continuity using a simple light cue to transform Vincent's nighttime "graveyard" to daytime "flower bed," while the boy maintains the continuous action of digging. His mother enters, admonishing the boy, who pokes his head sheepishly from the hole in close-up. Banished to his room, the film reverts to 2D animation to depict a silhouette of a small Vincent ascending a massive, misshapen staircase.
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