Revisit Tim Burton’s early student movies
For the longest time, Tim Burton and Disney had a relationship that existed somewhere between tenuous and non-existent. In fact, it stretched all the way back to the budding filmmaker’s student days.
Many think that the first collaboration between the two came in 1993 when Burton wrote and produced Henry Selick’s The Nightmare Before Christmas. However, the stop-motion favourite was funded and distributed by subsidiaries Touchstone Pictures and Buena Vista rather than the Mouse House itself. That’s precisely why the first genuine pairing didn’t occur until Burton steered Alice in Wonderland to over a billion dollars at the box office in 2010.
Burton initially got his foot in the door through the California Institute of the Arts’ animators programme, with Walt Disney being one of the university’s founding members. Some of the most important names in the modern history of the medium are alumni, including Brad Bird, John Lasseter, and John Musker. Still, the future Beetlejuice director unsurprisingly viewed himself as an outsider.
That being said, several of what would eventually become known as his signature visual and aesthetic flourishes were already on display. His short film King and Octopus boasted Disney-esque animation with the Burton-esque story of an imprisoned king yelling at the cephalopod who seized his throne from a dungeon after having been displaced by an eight-tentacled usurper.
It was his second short – Stalk of the Celery Monster – that ultimately landed him a job with the studio, though, which focuses on what appears to be a mad scientist carrying out gruesome experiments. However, it turns out that it’s really a dentist all along, with the terrified looks on the faces of the next batch of faces highlighting Burton’s penchant for mischievously dark humour.
On the strength of Stalk of the Celery Monster, Burton was hired to work as an animator on The Black Cauldron and The Fox and the Found, even if he didn’t particularly enjoy himself on either. Bird recalled his designs as being “better than anything they had in the movie,” but that wasn’t enough to see any of them used in the finished film. Meanwhile, he struggled on the latter feature, admitting to Vanity Fair that he “couldn’t even fake the Disney style,” leaving his animals looking “like roadkill”.
Burton was eventually fired altogether when his short film Frankenweenie – which he eventually remade as a stop-motion movie almost 30 years later – was deemed too scary for Disney’s target audience. The explanation was that the company “didn’t really know what to do with him” given his obvious talent that nonetheless sat completely outside of the family-friendly outfit’s wheelhouse. Still, it worked out exceedingly well for both parties in the short and long-term until they were eventually reunited for not just Alice in Wonderland but the live-action remake of Dumbo decades later.
