Tim Burton owes everything to his first trip to the cinema: “Those things can impact you”
Your earliest cinematic memory depends when you were born. Perhaps you can remember sneaking into a movie theatre before you were old enough, or maybe you remember your parents letting you push a VHS into the machine as if you were delivering a letter to Father Christmas, excitedly waiting for the magic to appear on your television screen.
Gothic auteur Tim Burton believes that the movies you watch when you’re young have a huge effect on you as you get older, sticking in the back of your mind as formative memories of the power of the cinematic medium. I find it hard to believe that endlessly watching High School Musical as a kid shaped me into the person I am today, but maybe the effects are there. I’d argue that it was my obsession with The Cat in the Hat which had a much more lasting effect.
So, it seems that some influences are much more apparent than others, and for Burton, one of his earliest cinematic memories proved to set the tone for his whole career. It was like he was destined for stardom as an idiosyncratic director, one where he would march to the beat of his own drum, crafting a world that harnesses an accessible kind of darkness – not exactly scary but certainly preoccupied with the enigmatic world of the macabre.
You might be thinking, then, that Burton was shaped by a film featuring ghosts and ghouls, or perhaps some other gothic setting. Yet, the director was actually transfixed by Jason and the Argonauts, the first film he ever saw at the cinema.
Talking to Samdb News, Burton explained, “There was a theater in Burbank, the Cornell Theater—they’d show triple features for 50 cents. Absolutely, I’ll never forget those first theater experiences. I remember seeing Jason and the Argonauts as my first movie and I still remember it. So, those things can impact you—or they did to me—and I think they still can to some degree… and that’s amazing.”
Forget a gothic film, what could be more fitting for Burton than a movie which used pioneering stop-motion effects? Before Burton became a director, he cut his teeth in the world of animation, working for Disney before making the stop-motion short film Vincent. Throughout his career, Burton has come back to stop-motion for movies like The Nightmare Before Christmas (although Henry Selick directed that one), Corpse Bride, and Frankenweenie.
You have to wonder if Burton would’ve fallen for stop-motion at all had he not stumbled across Jason and the Argonauts as a kid. The film’s effects were the work of Ray Harryhausen, the legendary animator Burton has often tipped his hat to over the years. He once told Pop Entertainment, “His monsters had more personality than most of the actors in the movies. Even if the monster was just a monster; the death scene was always just so beautiful and tragic. The final little twist of the tail or the one final breath or whatever.”
Harryhausen shaped stop-motion like nobody else, managing to breathe a strange sort of humanity into every creature he brought to life. Burton was fascinated by the myths, especially Jason and the Argonauts and the way its imagery tapped into something timeless. Talking to David Schwartz in 2003, he explained that the film has “classic mythological representations of things, the magical town or city, all these sort of images. They were just variations on all the kind of classic imagery that way, and symbols.”
Evidently, Burton owes a lot to Jason and the Argonauts, which opened his mind up to the potential of cinema to explore anything he could possibly imagine. He has subsequently brought these childhood wonders to life through his own work, never forgetting Harryhausen’s ability to create life from inanimate objects.
