Burton joined Disney in 1979 and went to work as an animator on the studio’s The Fox and the Hound.
Disney and I were a bad mix. For a year I was probably more depressed than I have ever been in my life. I worked for a great animator, Glenn Kean. He was nice, he was good to me, he’s a really strong animator and he helped me. But he also kind of tortured me because I got all the cute fox scenes to draw, and I couldn’t draw all those four-legged Disney foxes. I just couldn’t do it. I couldn’t even fake the Disney style. Mine looked like road kills. So luckily I got a lot of far-away shots to do. But it was not good; it was like Chinese water torture. Perhaps it was just the film I was working on. Imagine drawing a cute fox with Sandy Duncan’s voice for three years. It’s not something that you can relate to very much. I didn’t have the patience for it, I couldn’t do it – which was probably a good thing.
The Fox and the Hound
But what’s odd about Disney is that they want you to be an artist, but at the same time they want you to be a zombie factory worker and have no personality. It takes a very special person to make those two sides of your brain coexist. So I was very emotionally agitated at that time and couldn’t really function very well. I learned how to sleep sitting up with a pencil in my hand. It was so bad. For a while I would sleep a good eight to ten hours a night, and then I would go to work and sleep a good two hours in the morning, and then two hours in the afternoon, sitting up straight, so if anybody walked in I had my pencil at the ready.
I was very strange back then. I could see I had problems. I was always perceived as weird. I would sit in a closet a lot of the time and not come out, or I would sit up on top of my desk, or under my desk, or do weird things like get my wisdom teeth out and bleed all over the hallways. But I’ve gotten over that. I don’t sit in a closet any more. I was kept at arm’s length, but at the same time they let me be. I guess I did enough work not to get fired. I just had to do it fast, and because I couldn’t draw it anyway, it didn’t matter how much time I spent on it. It was probably better if I didn’t spend too much time on it. I was weird at that stage. I was having emotional problems. I didn’t know who I was.
But because I did these other kinds of drawings, people would see them and I got to do other things. The company was in a kind of screwy stage at that time. They were making things like Herbie Goes to Monte Carlo; nobody knew what was going on there. It was like a hermetically sealed world, and I got to move around a little bit in this weird sort of ‘non-structure’ structure. I got to try different things, to do concepts for live-action and animated projects.
There used to be this guy at Disney in the early days who was paid to come up with ideas and just do drawings. The animators liked his stuff, and he would draw whatever he wanted, like a hand with an eyeball on it. And I worked myself into that kind of position, as a sort of conceptual artist, which was really great. Then it started to turn fun again because I got to do whatever I liked, just sniff magic markers all day.
I was hired as a conceptual artist on The Black Cauldron, which was great because for several months I just got to sit in a room and draw any creature I wanted to: witches, furniture, just things. But then, as the film started to get closer to being a reality, they put me with this guy, Andreas Deja, who’s a good strong animator in the old, character-driven style, a style completely different from mine. They said to me, ‘Tim, we like your ideas, but Andreas is more what we want.’ I guess they wanted us to mate and have offspring of some kind. He would sit on one side of the room and I would sit on the other. It was like a friendly version of The Odd Couple.
The Black Cauldron
The elements …
So he ended up doing his thing and I did mine. I didn’t see the movie, but they didn’t use one single concept of mine. I basically exhausted all of my creative ideas for about ten years during that period. And when none of it was Used, it was kind of funny. I felt like a trapped princess. I had a great life, in a way. I was able to draw anything I wanted, but it was like working in this completely sealed environment in which you would never see the light of day. But there was always something that made it worthwhile, like doing the Vincent short and then the Frankenweenie one. Those things were unheard of. So I was lucky enough that everything led to a little higher level.
I did some conceptual work over ten years ago on that Barry Levinson movie Toys. I don’t think he even knows that I worked on it, but the guy at Disney asked me to do some conceptual stuff. There were still the remnants from the old days at Disney, there were still people who would say, ‘Let’s do another Fantasia’, guys from the old school where they didn’t have scripts, just a couple of zany gag men in a room who’d say, ‘Let’s get Louie Prima in here and work up a little number.’ Those guys were still around. It was cool.
… joined together
I remember when they were doing that movie Tron. I was just a lowly in-betweener at the time, and there were all these computer guys pitching stuff that only now they are able to do, and not even all of it. It seemed like a company in puberty really, that awkward stage where you’re still stuck in the past. I remember when I first got to Disney they were still talking about Walt and it was like this weird mantra: ‘Walt would have done this.’ And it was like, ‘How do you know?’ Then, it seemed to me, they realized they needed to come into the twenty-first century but they didn’t quite know how to do that. The movies that they made then were awkward. My impression was of a company being run by people who were the third or fourth on the tier – when the talented people left, retired or died they were left in charge.
While working as a conceptual artist, Burton found himself two allies in the shape of Disney executive, Julie Hickson, and Head of Creative Development, Tom Wilhite, who had begun to see in his drawings a rather unique talent that while not typically Disney was one they felt deserved to be nurtured. And so in 1982 Wilhite gave Burton $60,000 to
produce Vincent, a stop-motion animated short based on a poem Burton had written in verse in the style of his favourite children’s author Dr Seuss.
Trick or Treat
Trick or Treat
I had been working there about a year to a year and a half, maybe two years – I’m not very good with time. But by that stage I had worked on The Black Cauldron, I had worked on a thing called Trick or Treat for which I don’t think there was even a script, just a concept: a haunted house, kids, Hallowe’en. I had written this Vincent story, and I was bored, I was about ready to walk. I couldn’t take it any more. But there were a few people there who were very supportive of me, and they gave me a little money to do Vincent under the guise of it being a stop-motion test. It was very very nice of them to do that, and that kept me going for a while.
I had written Vincent originally as a children’s book and was going to do it that way first. But then I got the opportunity to make it as a stop-motion film. I wanted to do that kind of animation because I felt there was a gravity to those three-dimensional figures that was more real for that story. That was really important to me, I wanted it to feel more real.
Together with fellow Disney animator Rick Heinrichs, stop-motion animator Steven Chiodo and cameraman Victor Abdalov, Burton toiled away for two months and came up with the five-minute film. Shot in stark black and white in the style of the German expressionist movies of the 1920s, Vincent relates the story of seven-year-old Vincent Malloy, a somewhat disturbed child who fantasizes that he is Vincent Price. Flitting between the reality of his banal suburban existence and his fantasy world, Vincent imagines himself in a series of situations inspired by the Vincent Price/Edgar Allan Poe films that had had such an affect on Burton as a child, including experimenting on his dog – a theme that would subsequently reappear in Burton’s next project Frankenweenie – and welcoming his aunt to his home while simultaneously conjuring up the image of her dipped in hot wax. The film ends with Vincent lying on the ground in the dark quoting Poe’s ‘The Raven’.
Vincent Price, Edgar Allan Poe, those monster movies, those spoke to me. You see somebody going through that anguish and that torture – things you identify with – and it acts as a kind of therapy, a release. You make a connection with it. That’s what the Vincent thing really was for me. The film just goes in and out of Vincent’s own reality. He identifies and believes that he’s Vincent Price, and you see the world through his eyes. It clicks in and out of reality so to speak, and it ends with a quote from ‘The Raven’. The people at Disney thought he died, but he’s just lying there. Who’s to say whether he’s really dead or beautiful in his own little dream world? They wanted it to have more of an upbeat ending, but I never saw it as being downbeat in any way. It’s funny, I think it’s more uplifting if things are left to your imagination. I always saw those tacked-on happy endings as psychotic in a way. They wanted me to have the light click on and have his dad come in and go, ‘Let’s go to a football game or a baseball game.’ That was my first encounter with the happy ending syndrome.
‘The Raven’
I never directly linked the shots in Vincent to any specific films. There are no real shots from those Poe movies per se. It’s just more a matter of growing up and loving those movies than it is direct linkage in terms of shots. There’s a House of Wax thing, there’s some burying alive, some experiments, but I was more concerned with trying to get the stop-motion to work.
House of Wax
Anyone who has seen Vincent can be in no doubt that the title character, a pasty-faced youth with black, straggly hair, bears a striking resemblance to his creator.
Well, I never consciously go, ‘I’m going to do a drawing that looks like me’, but yeah, it’s certainly based on feelings that I had, for sure. But anything, even things that are perceived as commercial, like Batman, anything that people would find no personal, redeeming qualities in, for me, I’ve got to be in it to some degree. Even if it’s just a feeling. You invest so much in it, there has to be something you identify strongly with. And Vincent is certainly more pointedly specific to the way I felt. People would say, ‘That’s you Tim’, but what am I supposed to say? I don’t like to think about that. I like to think about it in terms of a concept. I’m very wary of analysing it too intellectually. I find it gets in the way of the more spontaneous, which I prefer to be if I can. If I start to think too much about it, it’s not good. But Vincent’s one that I feel really good about letting speak for itself, because it’s just what it is. It’s very hard in Hollywood because people like things literal. They don’t like it when you leave things open for interpretation, but I like that very much.
The film’s expressionistic set design and photography seems reminiscent of Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr Caligari.
I certainly saw pictures of it, in any monster book there were pictures of it. But I didn’t see it until fairly recently. I think it probably has more to do with being inspired by Dr Seuss. It just happens to be shot in black and white, and there’s a Vincent Price/Gothic kind of thing that makes it feel that way. I grew up loving Dr Seuss. The rhythm of his stuff spoke to me very clearly. Dr Seuss’s books were perfect: right number of words, the right rhythm, great subversive stories. He was incredible, he was the greatest, definitely. He probably saved a bunch of kids who nobody will ever know about.
Vincent
Vincent
Vincent
Vincent
Vincent
Vincent was narrated by Burton’s childhood idol Vincent Price and marked the beginning of a friendship between the director and the actor that lasted until Price’s death in 1993.
We sent Vincent Price the storyboards and asked him to do the narration, and he was incredible. It was probably one of the most shaping experiences of my life. Who knows what it’s going to be like? You grow up having a feeling about someone, then you meet them, and what if the guy goes, ‘Get the the fuck out of here. Get away from me, kid.’ But he was so wonderful, and so interesting as a person in what he liked in terms of art and stuff. He was very supportive. I always had the feeling he understood exactly what the film was about, even more than I did; he understood that it wasn’t just a simple homage, like ‘Gee Mr Price, I’m your biggest fan.’ He understood the psychology of it, and that amazed me and made me feel very good, made me feel that someone saw me for what I was, and accepted me on that level.
It’s a scary proposition meeting somebody who helped you through childhood, who had that affect on you, especially when you’re sending them something that’s showing that impact in a kind of cheesy, children’s book kind of way. But he was so great. Those kinds of things are very important to keep you going, emotionally, especially when you run into so many shady characters. Some people are just nice, but he seemed to truly get it. Again, there’s a reason why you respond to certain people on the screen – there’s some sort of light there, they project something beyond even what their character is.
Vincent was theatrically released for two weeks in one Los Angeles cinema with the teen drama Tex, starring Matt Dillon. But before it was consigned to the Disney vaults, it garnered several critical accolades when it played at festivals in London, Chicago and Seattle, winning two awards at Chicago and the Critics’ Prize at the Annecy Film Festival in France.
Disney were pleased with Vincent, but they didn’t know what they were going to do with it. It’s like, ‘Gee, what shall we worry about today, this five-minute animated short film or our $30 million dollar movie?’ I felt very happy to have made it. It’s cathartic to make anything, to get it done, so that was good, and it got a good response from people who saw it. It was a little odd, though, because Disney seemed to be pleased with it, but at the same time kind of ashamed. I just think they didn’t know what to do with it. There’s not really a market for a five-minute animated film, and the company was in a strange state of flux, so it didn’t rate really high on their priority scale. Plus, I didn’t even know whether I was an employee then.