We Need to Talk About Tim...

A fan's analysis of the deterioration of a once great artist.

By: Josh McCormack 

Tim Burton's latest collaboration with Disney, the studio that once fired him in the 1980s for being too morbid, was released this past weekend. 

Dumbo, a live action remake of one of my favorite animated classics, is Burton's 19th feature film and the first of which that I disliked from my initial viewing. 

Gorgeous set design, an adorable CGI elephant and fun performances from Burton regulars Michael Keaton and Eva Green are sadly not enough to keep this movie afloat. As someone who not only loves the original 1941 film, but who has also considered themselves a staunch Burton supporter (even through the ups and downs), it baffled me how little redeeming value I found in Dumbo. 

As I sat watching the film early yesterday afternoon with my girlfriend, I couldn't help but notice the lack of engagement from the audience, especially younger viewers who seemed intent on trying to leave their seats whenever possible. It was about halfway through the screening that I realized I was experiencing what seemed to be a microcosm of filmgoers' growing disinterest in Tim Burton. 

Why does the very mention of one of the most renowned, visionary and influential filmmakers of the 1980s and '90s now spawn eye rolls from just about everyone outside of a niche, loyal fan group?

Perhaps it's over saturation or even a lack of creativity. Or maybe the reason behind the fall of the once great artist begins when he chose to please the audience as a whole, rather than using his unique style to tell stories that spoke to him. 

One of the things I've always loved about Burton, since I was introduced to him at a very young age, is how his love for classic monster movies and science fiction/horror stories of his youth have always shown through in his work. Whether it's a Godzilla cameo in Pee Wee's Big Adventure or even a reference to Nosferatu in Batman Returns, Burton almost always seems to pay homage to those who inspired him, while still trying to get his stories told. 

The difference now, however, is the fact that he sometimes seems to be fighting the parameters of the story he was burdened with in order to get his love for that which is gothic onscreen. Hell, even in Dumbo's cluttered third act climax, he somehow manages to fit in a fog-machine laden haunted house sequence. While it's wonderfully staged, it has absolutely nothing to do with the rest of the film. 

What made Burton so fascinating in his early work (1985-1994 being his prime years) was that he found the right projects in which his style was integral to the film and not a hinderance to it. 

His first film, Pee Wee's Big Adventure is the cinematic equivalent of a playground for both he and star/cowriter, Paul Reubens. The road trip format gave Burton plenty of opportunity to design wacky, frightening and funny scenarios, all of which were not set in the confines of a reality Burton would be uncomfortable in. In this 91-minute work of comedic genius, Burton fits in stop-motion dinosaurs, a nightmarish clown sequence and one of the most traumatizing fucking things that a child would ever see:

                                

While most people think of Pee-Wee Herman himself when looking back at this movie, this is an incredible debut film from Burton. So many of his aesthetics that were works in progress in his short films (such as the wonderful 'Vincent' and 'Frankenweenie') were on full display in Pee Wee and they would carry on and evolve throughout his career. 

With Pee Wee, Burton also found his knack for tapping into the mentality of characters who were viewed as outsiders as Burton had been his entire life. This would carry through in films like the spectacular Beetlejuice, wherein Winona Ryder's character can see the dead ghosts of Alec Baldwin and Geena Davis because she is "strange and unusual".

Even Burton's version of Bruce Wayne for his two Batman films is not a socialite, playboy. Instead, he's a bit of a hermit who holes himself up in Wayne manor until he dons the cape and cowl.

The most iconic outsider Burton ever crafted was in 1990s Edward Scissorhands. Played beautifully by the once great Johnny Depp, Edward has been said to be the exaggerated version of Burton in his most vulnerable state. The film is still beautiful to this day, no matter how many jokes or parodies may have sprung up in the nearly three decades after its release. 

While the film is known for its outlandish, Burtonesque visual style, the film works because of the contrast between Burton's trademark black and whites amongst the explosive pastel colors of everyday suburbanites. This is Burton's vision of feeling as though he himself was more at home inside of dark castles rather than the rather frightening frenzy of consumer America.  His trademark style is encapsulated in Edward, rather than having it consume the surroundings as it sadly began to do in his later years. 

Burton's last great film came only four years later in the form of the massively underrated Ed Wood. His second collaboration with Johnny Depp signifies a change in pace for the filmmaker and one that he sadly never kept up with after this film.

The film focuses on yet another outsider, but one who actually lived. Edward D Wood Jr is known by many (falsely, I might add) as one of the worst filmmakers of all time, responsible for such schlock classics as Bride of the Monster and Plan 9 From Outer Space. His story may at first seem rather unremarkable, but Wood was also a transvestite in the 1950s and had working relationships with some incredible characters, one of his closest being with the once great horror icon Bela Lugosi (Dracula himself!)

Burton uses his sensibilities to heighten the facts of Wood's life, making it tragic, comedic, absurd and sometimes mythic. With healthy splashes of realism when the film digs into darker territory, such as drug addiction, Ed Wood is perhaps the most grown-up Burton has ever allowed himself to be. The film is tailor made to feed directly into Burton's interests (i.e. flying saucers, zombies and vampires), but it also shows Burton at his most human and uplifting. While still crass and wild, the movie rewards creativity and Wood's film creations are not looked down upon, but rather as an achievement of an artist who followed his dreams and made his movies his way. It's a humanist film and as the iconic film critics Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert said on their film review program, "Tim Burton loves people".

It's a shame, then, that it's the people that wound up getting lost in Burton's later work. 

As the 90s rolled on, Burton's movies started to get a little funky. Now, don't get me wrong, I still have a fondness for just about every one of them (as I said, I'm a fan), but it's at around the point of Mars Attacks!, his 1996 celebration of schlock, that he begins becoming more interested in concepts than in characters.

This isn't to say that his films become less entertaining, but rather that they become less focused and less interested in meaning. If Edward Scissorhands had been made in this latter portion of Burton's career, I'm not sure it would have maintained the heartfelt elements that made that film work so well. 

Mars Attacks!, Sleepy Hollow and Planet of the Apes, his remake of the 1968 classic of the same name, all feel like the effects of an artistic filmmaker being lured in by big studio practices. Each of the films feed into his sensibilities and are fun to watch (yes I'm defending Mars Attacks! AND his messy POTA, fight me!), but they each lack the strong screenplay that matched his hypnotic visuals in the earlier days. 

This continued to be the case well into the new millennium. After the disappointment of Planet of the Apes, both critically and financially, Burton would wind up making the 2003 fantastical drama, Big Fish. It's a competent enough movie with more heart than his few films prior to its release, but it still feels like a movie that could've been made by anyone and where Burton's aesthetic choices aren't integral to the story at hand. 

His subsequent film would be the big budget 2005 remake of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, a film in which we begin to see the dangers of Burton going too far in his visual style due to the advent of computer technology. As if to try a complete 180 from Big Fish, Burton goes completely nuts by filling up the frame with so much stuff all at once and he practically loses the performances of the actors in the process, with the exception of Johnny Depp as Willy Wonka who's chewing up the neon colored scenery with completely unbridled, if somewhat annoying, glee. 

The most essential creative relationship Burton would make in this portion of his career was with actress Helena Bonham Carter. Her performances are magnetic in each film she was cast in by Burton, even those that aren't quite up to snuff in most other aspects. Her best performance came in the form of the Mrs. Lovett for Burton's adaption of Stephen Sondheim's musical, Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street.

While musical theatre purists may try and run me off the street, Sweeney Todd is the last live-action endeavor by Burton that I genuinely love. It's stylish, sexy, gothic, bloody as all hell and has a fantastic soundtrack. Perhaps, it's the fact that Burton hadn't quite done something so adult since Sleepy Hollow, but Sweeney Todd feels like a breath of fresh air in his "hit or miss" recent years. I understand it has issues and respect Sondheim fanatics who hate it, but to me it's practically everything years of Burton films had been missing. 

It was three years later, however, when I believe the final nail in the career of Tim Burton started being nailed in.

And it came from the house of mouse.

Tim Burton's relationship with the Disney corporation is a fascinating one.

As a Disney animator in the early 80s he was quickly fired when they realized his dark sensibilities did not quite match something like Fox and the Hound. 

In 1993, however, he attempted a mending of that fraught relationship with Disney by providing the story and producing the now cult classic, The Nightmare Before Christmas. Due to Disney not knowing how to market the film and releasing it under its arthouse "Touchstone Pictures" banner, the movie didn't find an audience and died a horrible death at the box office. 

Years later, home video proved to resurrect the film and soon Disney found themselves selling more Nightmare merchandise than almost any of their other properties. So, of course, Burton became their star child once he earned them a few bucks.

With 2010's Alice in Wonderland we see Burton working with his biggest budget and the most skilled group of craftsman since perhaps his two Batman films from '89 and '92. If you thought Charlie and the Chocolate Factory was a little visually crowded, Alice is the equivalent of giving that film an all night coke bender.

On a purely technical level, Alice is still a marvel even nine years after its initial release. The detail in the backgrounds and sets is jaw dropping. Yet, as proven multiple times in the past, the heart of the story gets lost in the crowded visuals and this is also the first time in which the "quirky" visuals of Burton start to become a nuisance. I like Depp's nutty performance as the Mad Hatter, but I'm not sure we needed a contortionist break dancing sequence to cap this fantasy epic. 

However, Alice in Wonderland  wound up making over $1 billion worldwide and is still Burton's highest grossing film to date. 

Burton's next film, and his last collaboration with the increasingly unstable Johnny Depp, was 2012's Dark Shadows. This adaption of the popular vampire-based soap opera from the 1970s sounded like it could be somewhat of a return to form from Burton and co., but sadly it's one of his lowest grossing movies to date and it was not met with high praise from critics either.

It has its moments, but Dark Shadows is definitely a low point for Burton. Every aspect of the filmmaking seems like its on autopilot and the decision to remove the high drama of the television show and replace it with "fish out of water" comedy is purely baffling.

Much like his low point after the failure of Planet of the Apes, Burton focused on a smaller more intimate project in the form of Big Eyes, a true story about the painter Margaret Keane (played by Amy Adams) and the least Tim Burton movie ever to be made by Tim Burton. It's not bad, and I like seeing Burton take a break from big, green screen extravaganzas, but what's the point of hiring Burton if you don't want his style?

This was then followed up in 2016 by the young adult centric, Harry Potter ripoff, "meant to be a franchise starter" known as Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children. Having literally seen the movie a few days back just so I can mention it in this blog post, it's pretty fresh in my mind and I have to say, it's perhaps one of his better movies in recent years on a directing level. 

Burton uses a healthy mix of CG and practical effects (including a wonderful stop motion sequence) and his visual style is reminiscent of something like Beetlejuice or Edward Scissorhands where the psychedelic, gothic visuals do not clash with real world sets. Eva Green also proves to be fantastic as Burton's new muse after he and Helena Bonham Carter ended their personal and professional relationship after the release of Dark Shadows.

Sadly though, the script is abysmal and the lead performances from our teen stars are terrible.

Close, but no cigar Timmy!

Ever since the mid-90s it seems that Tim Burton has been at war with himself over the type of filmmaker he wants to be and the type others want him to be. 

It doesn't help that there is a backlash no matter what type of film he makes nowadays. If he goes "Full Burton" (i.e. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory or Alice in Wonderland) he's criticized for going overboard. Yet if he tries to scale back (a la Big Fish or Big Eyes) people question why he was even hired to make the film in the first place.

It is with Dumbo where this battle of identities comes to a nasty head. 

It's a movie that is constantly shifting between a faithful and family friendly Disney film and an edgy  Burton film literally from scene to scene. Within the course of about ten minutes, there is a sequence in which a character plays with a cute CGI monkey, immediately followed by a brutal murder by an elephant that is THEN followed by a recreation of the tearjerking "Baby Mine" sequence from the original film. 

That's just how the fucking thing starts!

There are flashes of inspiration in Dumbo and while I was watching it, I couldn't help but ask myself how would Tim Burton have directed this film if he had made it in his prime?

I suppose he would've gotten rid of the strange decision to focus on Colin Farrell's character of a war amputee and would've treated the character of Dumbo with the same respect he had given a character like Edward, Ed Wood or even Winona Ryder's Lydia in Beetlejuice. Dumbo is the ultimate Disney story about the persecution of an outsider and it baffles my mind that neither Burton nor screenwriter Ehren Kruger (*cough*HACK*cough*) could focus the story on the titular character. 

As I look at the remnants of the beautiful disaster that was Dumbo (probably my least favorite of his films, by the way), I have to ask myself, is all hope lost for Tim Burton getting his groove back?

Well, no, I don't think so. In terms of live-action movies, he may have officially put himself into a corner, but his animated stuff is still wonderful.

I mentioned Nightmare Before Christmas earlier, but 2005's Corpse Bride and 2012's Frankenweenie (an animated adaption of his 1984 short film) are both some of his best work in recent years and show that as his live-action movies begin to look more and more phony, perhaps animation is where he truly belongs.

However, I believe that the key to having Tim Burton regain his throne as one of the most influential  live-action filmmakers of his time, is giving him about half the budget people like Bob Iger have given him for films like Alice in Wonderland and Dumbo and let him go "Full Burton".

Creative freedom with financial restraints seems to be where all great artists thrive and I don't believe Burton is any different. 

There was a time when a new Tim Burton film was something to look forward to and not something to dread. With all the terrible shit that's happening in the world today, at least give me that feeling back.