Tim Burton’s cinematic style in five scenes
It’s gothic, it’s grotesque, it’s probably unsuitable for children but nobody cares. That’s right, it’s a Tim Burton film. Like the work of Wes Anderson and Guillermo del Toro, Tim Burton’s cinema explodes with personality. So much so that we’ve had to come up with a word to encapsulate the director’s unmistakable visual style: the Burtonesque.
But what does the Burtonesque entail? Is it just pale-faced Johnny Depp look-alikes dancing the graveyard rumba to the sound of Danny Elfman? Well, yes and no.The Burtonesque centres on the dualistic relationship between nightmarish terror and childish wonder. Heavily influenced by the aesthetics of german expressionism, Burton’s cinema is intensely stylised, offering a warped version of reality that seeks to return the viewer to a state of childlike curiosity.
Much of Burton’s work has been an attempt to recreate the dreamscapes of his favourite childhood movies, which mostly involved monsters of one sort or another. From Edward Scissorhands and The Nightmare Before Christmas to Charlie and The Chocolate Factory and Big Fish, Burton has revelled in giving cinematic life to the realm of the unconscious – bringing a complex range of emotions to the surface in the process.
Below, we’ve looked at five key scenes which we believe encapsulate Burton’s style, ranging from the surreal to the downright macabre. let’s get to it.
Tim Burton’s style in five key scenes:
Surreal design – The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993)
One of the most commonly identified aspects of the Burtonesque is the director’s surreal and whimsical aesthetic. As a young man, Tim worked as an animator for Disney on films like The Fox And The Hound, but, as we would later confess, “couldn’t draw those four-legged Disney foxes.”
When he left Disney to pursue his own work, Burton opted for a more surreal, exaggerated and deliberately imperfect style, which made its way into everything from live-action offerings like Beetlejuice and Edward Scissorhands, to animated wonders like The Corpse Bride and, of course, The Nightmare Before Christmas, the latter of which contains some of the most surreal and grotesque examples of Burton’s character and set design.
Gothic suburbia – Edward Scissorhands (1990)
Tim Burton’s uncanny, dreamlike settings are an essential part of his overall aesthetic. The director was greatly influenced by the work of German Expressionist filmmakers like Metropolis director Fritz Lang and horror innovator F.W Murnau, whose gothic masterpiece Nosferatu casts a sinister shadow over much of his work.
Burton frequently combines the gothic imagery of Murnau and his contemporaries with a sort of suburban Americana. The juxtaposition between the idyllic and the sinister crops up time and time again, but it is especially pronounced in Edward Scissorhands, where the normalcy of middle America is interrupted by the arrival of a Frankensteinesque creature with scissors instead of fingers. Edward’s slow integration into the town of Tampa allows Burton to point out just how bizarre the suburbs really are. For all his pallor and melancholy, Edward is actually very normal compared to the tanned, pearly-teethed suburbanites with their endless barbecues and pastel shirts.
Alienated characters – Beetlejuice (1988)
That brings us to another important facet of Burton’s style – the alienated protagonist. Something of a loner growing up, Burton was labelled a freak by his peers, many of whom found his fascination with monster movies unnerving. Burton always felt that it was everyone else who was, as Lydie Deetz puts it in Beetlejuice “strange and unusual.”
Almost all of Burton’s protagonists are misunderstood. Lydia is the perfect example, though fairly unique among her peers in that she is female. Like Burton himself, Lydie takes pride in her outsider status, celebrating her own ability to accept the stranger things in life at face value, whereas everyone else seems to be happy to bumble through life without ever getting close to the veil between the living and the dead.
The past lives – Big Fish (2003)
One of Burton’s favourite narrative techniques is using flashbacks to give depth to characters, many of whom are fixated on their past. Take Willy Wonka from Charlie and The Chocolate Factory, who is frequently thrown into contextualising flashbacks which help explain why he is the way he is. As is often the case in Burton’s cinema, it’s mostly down to his parents.
These narrative rewinds play an especially important role in Big Fish, a film which, like Edward Scissorhands, begins with a parent recounting the story of their life to a younger listener. In both cases, the flashbacks are far more colourfully shot, suggesting that Burton regards the past as a valuable source of knowledge, happiness and peace.
Death is fun – The Corpse Bride (2005)
Though many of Burton’s films focus on death, there is always a sense of fun and optimism lying just beneath the surface. Death is never merely tragic. In fact, in many cases, it is a cause for celebration.
Take this scene from The Corpse Bride for example, where Burton’s fascination with the Dios de Los Muertes ( Day of The Dead) celebration comes out in full force. In almost every case, Burton shows us that death is far from the end of a road – rather it is the beginning of a new journey with its own twists and turns.
