Tim Burton – The 9-letter Genius
His name is made of exactly nine letters. For some those nine letters add up to ECCENTRIC. For the rest of us, the nine letters add up to INGENIOUS. Let’s just call him TIM BURTON.
When you spell out those nine letters in that order with a pause after the first three letters, that is when you call out the name of Tim Burton, certain images are evoked in your mind. And before you can come to terms with this sudden invasion of frenetic frames, you are grappling with Edward’s scissor-hands, Ed Wood’s moustache, Charlie’s hat, Sweeney Todd’s razor, the Joker’s teeth or perhaps just a big fish!
If you look at his cinema as a collection of renaissance parts, then Burton’s cinema is perhaps the most basic in the world. He creates images which stay with you till you breathe your last. Once you have seen a Tim Burton film, it’s never difficult to recollect it. You may love it, you may hate it, but you won’t forget it.
It’s an incredible mix of comfort and discomfort. I remember when I was really small and Star Movies was a new phenomenon on the Indian tube, they showed Edward Scissorhands. Blame it on raging hormones, but the scene in the barber shop where Edward is seduced by one of his female fans of the neighbourhood stuck in my head for a long, long time. It enticed me in the quick flash of flesh but it disturbed me that Edward couldn’t possibly do anything about it given his physical state of being. Unknowingly, I was sympathising with Edward, backing him.
The same sympathy would find my side maybe 16 summers later when a man would butcher people in the name of giving them a hair cut or a shave. I didn’t hate Sweeney Todd, I rooted for him, rooted for him to slit those throats and the lovely Mrs Lovett to bake some pies.
This internal disturbance, to me, is one of the trademark combustive agents of a Tim Burton film. When you see those bizarre characters of Big Fish lining up in that telling final scene of the film, the disorder inside is calmed down and you lap up the sheer magic of his cinema. The itch is eased off and the initiation towards the love of the film and its people had begun.
When Burton says: “I’ve always loved the idea of fairy tales, but somehow I never managed to completely connect with them. What interests me is taking those classic images and themes and trying to contemporarise them a bit. I believe folk tales and fairy tales have some sort of psychological foundation that makes that possible.”
If the disconcerting feeling leading to a sense of fulfillment not a psychological foundation, what is?
Now in the middle of all the madness that is Tim Burton, the mastermind would sculpt films that would help the man himself switch sides. For a director to be allowed to make an Edward Scissorhands, he needs a Batman on his CV. For someone to get the support to make an Ed Wood, he needs a Batman Forever.
Yes, Burton is perhaps the only director in the history of cinema who is known more for his quirkier and intimate films than for his blockbusters. You are more likely to call him the maker of Sleepy Hollow and Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure than the man who first successfully brought the Caped Crusader and the Boy Wonder to celluloid. Christopher Nolan may take away the Joker from Burton, but no head will be able to bring to life The Headless Horseman better than Tim.
And now the man who started his movie career almost three decades back in animation wants to give a fresh new meaning to animation.
A scene from Tim Burton's 9 : Click to see larger image
In Burton’s words: “In Hollywood, they think drawn animation doesn’t work anymore, computers are the way. They forget that the reason computers are the way is that Pixar makes good movies. So everybody tries to copy Pixar. They’re relying too much on the technology and not enough on the artists. The fact that Disney closed down its animation division is frightening to me. Someday soon, somebody will come along and do a drawn-animated film, and it’ll be beautiful and connect with people, and they’ll all go, ‘Oh, we’ve got to do that!’ It’s ridiculous.”
That “ridiculous” bit is not far away from the big screen. It’s called 9 and Burton’s produced it.
In a time, “too-near future”, powered and enabled by the invention known as the Great Machine, the world’s machines have turned on mankind and sparked social unrest, decimating the human population before being largely shut down.
But as our world fell to pieces, a mission began to salvage the legacy of civilisation; a group of small creations was given the spark of life by a scientist in the final days of humanity, and they continue to exist post-apocalypse.
Man vs Machine, Hand Drawing vs Computers, Burton vs The World, it’s time to go back to the basics. One more time. The countdown has begun… 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1….
Tim Burton's 9 releases worldwide on September 9, 2009
Anurag Kashyap
Abhay Deol
Dibakar Banerjee
Hansal Mehta
Khalid Mohamed
Kundan Shah
Anish Kuruvilla
Jaideep Verma
Manish Gupta
Navdeep Singh
Bhavani Iyer
D. Santosh
Onir
Ashvin Kumar
Ramu Ramanathan
Sudhir Mishra
Pankaj Advani
Revathy
Saurabh Shukla
Shilpa Shukla
Sujoy Ghosh
Suparn Verma
Santosh Sivan
Shashank Ghosh
Shivajee
Pavan Kaul
Partho Sen-Gupta
Prroshant Naryannan
Sam Langoria
Satish Kasetty
Oh! yes there’s something about Tim Burton’s movies and the characters in them- unconventional yes but we still fall for them.looking forward to 9 now for some more maverick stuff!!!
The initial disturbance…well put. That is what it is, the discomfort, the so nicely flawed genius creations…
And that pick from Sweeney Todd so nicely sums up the irony…
Christopher Nolan has not snatched Joker from Tim Burton. He has created a darker joker – a more contemporary and mysterious one. The Real joker is Tim’s Jack Nicholson, who died in peels of laughter instead of shamefully hanging upside down and incarcerated ingloriously.
I need to come back to discussing Nicholson’s Joker soon. Still in awe of the portrayal. And what an entry man. Remember the pan from Madonna’s poster, the dark-lit room. I find Jim Carrey’s Mask a nod to the performance.
The charac almost always seem grotesquely made up yet never shirks me away…i dont kno but this guy is able to make one look beyond that weird make up…every time…and end up empathizing with them…..Depp and Carter particularly seem to revel in this act….
‘If the disconcerting feeling leading to a sense of fulfillment not a psychological foundation, what is?’ ..indeed….
@ Arthi
The reason is Burton generally makes a veiled critique though his characters. He has this sympathy for the outsider, the odd man out, someone who is “not normal”. Edward Scissorhands, beyond his bizarre appearance, was a man totally at odds with the conformist nature of the American suburbia. And that was the reason why he had choosen Ed Wood as the biopic subject.
Ed Wood was a B-Movie maker, but in a way he was also one of the early directors who worked outside the Hollywood studio system, an “indie” director of sorts in his own ways. Watch Ed Wood, the movie is not just about the life of Ed Wood, its also about the B-Movie universe, a whole parallel universe by itself, with it’s own superstars and egoes.
That is how we end up emphathizing with Burton’s characters, because in a way, they appeal to the rebel in us, the desire to break away from normal. People often go ga ga over Burton’s visual brilliance, but not many actually look at the overall themes he handles in his movies.
Man, a pity that ED WOOD and SLEEPY HOLLOW are not available in the indian stores. :-(
true rantakar…:)..
Very nicely wriiten article on a very relevant article…im sure we all have our tim burton moments that will never escape our head…actually im almost always sub consciously thinking of the brightly colored houses in edward scissorhands…
wondeful post pratim. Tim Burton is unarguably one of the best directors of all time.
“Yes, Burton is perhaps the only director in the history of cinema who is known more for his quirkier and intimate films than for his blockbusters”
absolutely, and i guess even he would prefer that.
Tim Burton for me is like Edward Bloom, a storyteller whose tales are unbelievable fantasies but the narration is so strong that it becomes real.
wow 9 letters! whe they make the sequel we’ll use his middle initial… nice