Still employed at Disney, Burton next directed a live-action, all-Oriental version of the Grimms’ fairy tale Hansel and Gretel which was produced for $116,000 for the studio’s then embryonic cable network The Disney Channel. Written by its executive producer, Julie Hickson, the show lacks Vincent’s emotional depth, but is a perfect illustration of Burton’s outré imagination, deviating from the original Grimms’ tale in a variety of uniquely Burtonesque ways, climaxing with a kung-fu fight between Hansel and Gretel and the wicked witch, who is played by a man.
The Disney Channel had just started and they had a fairy-tale series, and I had this idea of doing Hansel and Gretel using only Japanese people and giving it a little bit of a twist. I had a bunch of drawings and they let me do it. Everything, especially early on, was based on drawings. I had a room filled with drawings, and I think that was the thing that made them feel comfortable about me, to some degree. Even though, visually, the drawings aren’t easy to imagine in three dimensions, or in any other form than those drawings, I think it made them feel I wasn’t completely insane, and that I could actually do something. And again, as a company, they were just kind of floundering around a little bit at that point. Up until very recently, I could never imagine a scenario where I would get to do these things in a studio situation. It was unheard of. I mean now they have those new programmes where studios foot the bill, or they’ll invest in film schools. Disney, I think, now tests potential directors by giving them a scene and having them shoot it. But at that time there was no real precedent for what I was doing, and so I was always very aware that the situation I was in was fairly unique. So even when I felt bad, I still felt pretty good.
It follows the fairy tale fairly closely except that it’s done with Japanese people. I have always been drawn to the Japanese sense of design. Growing up with Godzilla movies, their sense of design and colour really appealed to me, and it has a slight martial arts twist. I liked those martial arts movies, and if you like something, then you like to see it. That was always my attitude. I’ve never been able to predict or think what an audience would like to see. I’ve always felt: how can anybody else want to see it if I don’t want to? And if I want to see it, and nobody else wants to, then at least I get to see it. So, there’s one person who’ll enjoy it.
Hansel and Gretel marked the first time that Burton had worked with actors, albeit a cast of total non-professionals.
It was pretty amateurish, but that was more to do with me than with them. But I enjoyed doing it, and I learned a lot from it. It’s funny, if you’ve never made a movie with actual people, you think you can do it, you don’t see any reason why you can’t. It looks very easy. But there is something about it that’s abstract. So it was a good learning experience for me. Being an animator, early in my life I rarely spoke to people. I was not a good communicator. I never spoke much – even now – but it used to be worse. I would never finish my sentences; my mind would kind of race ahead. It was not like we were doing a Shakespeare play where there was a foundation to it. It was hard to describe to people, and I wasn’t very good at it. I think I’ve got a little better each time I’ve done it. Obviously, it’s a medium where you have to communicate with a large number of people, so that was really the first time I experienced that side of it. I had done it with those Super 8 movies, but this was different, and I think it helped me with the next thing. When I did Frankenweenie, I had already learned a lot of stuff from Hansel and Gretel in terms of how to deal with people.
Hansel and Gretel
The witch’s house
Despite its low budget, Burton employed a series of ambitious special effects, including stop-motion animation courtesy of his Vincent collaborators Heinrichs and Chiodo, as well as a number of on-set visual gags. And by changing Hansel’s and Gretel’s father’s profession from a woodcutter to a toymaker, Burton indulged in his passion for toys and gadgetry – a trait present in almost all his subsequent work – filling the screen with Japanese ‘Transformer’ toys.
‘A weird little puppet who forces Hansel to eat him’
Hansel and Gretel
We had front projection, stop-motion, every FX known to man, but extremely, extremely, extremely crude. It was a great way to try things out. I have always been interested in the combination of live-action and stop-motion animation, stemming from the Harryhausen movies I saw as a kid. This was a very ‘designed’ kind of thing. It’s weirdly ambitious on the one hand, and on the other it’s really cheesy and cheap. I don’t know where that thing with the toys comes from, however, except that I’ve always liked toys. I don’t recall having an extreme toy fixation or toy fetish. I always saw them as an extension of my imagination – at least that’s the way I used them, as a way to explore different ideas. There was a little duck toy that turns into a robot and a gingerbread man. He was a weird little puppet who forces Hansel to eat him.
But there really was no money to make it. I think it showed one night, Hallowe’en, at 10.30 p.m., which for The Disney Channel is like the 4.30 a.m. slot. So, that one didn’t go over too big. But there are little moments in it that I like. It was like one of those scary children’s shows I grew up watching.
I honestly don’t ever recall thinking that I wanted to be a director after I’d made Hansel and Gretel. The one thing I did know – and I think I knew this early on, right after the animation experience – was that, whatever I do, it’s just got to be more me. I can’t just pull it together, I’m not proficient enough as an illustrator to fake it. So I didn’t say, ‘Well, I want to be a director’, because that wasn’t where my head was. It was more that I was just doing this work, and enjoying it, and I thought the main thing was to create images. It’s still true, actually. I think it has less to do with ‘I am now a director or a movie maker’, and more to do with the joy of creating. And this can be in many forms: images, feelings, things, just creating anything.
After that I just kept on developing things, and at that point I was developing The Nightmare Before Christmas concept. Often when I was developing something it wasn’t a case of ‘Now I’m going to develop this’, but there would be drawings and the seed of a thought. Things would come out more from a series of sketches. It would be a case of ‘This character’s kind of interesting’, and then discovering what it meant, and uncovering the psychology behind it. Things came about a bit more organically in this period of time. It was not like ‘Okay, now I’m doing this, and then I’m going to develop that’; it was much more like a weirdly organic process. It wasn’t clean-cut.
Burton’s third directorial outing was Frankenweenie, a stunning twenty-five-minute black and white reworking of James Whale’s 1931 version of Frankenstein and its 1935 sequel, The Bride of Frankenstein. Written by Lenny Ripp from Burton’s story, Frankenweenie was produced by his champion at Disney, Julie Hickson, and financed by the studio to the tune of almost $1 million. Burton was twenty-five at the time.
Frankenweenie came out of some drawings and some feelings, and then thinking that maybe this could be good, maybe we could do it as a fea-turette. I think it was originally intended to go out with Pinocchio on its re-release. That whole period of time was very organic. From my thinking of the ideas, to the decision to finance them, none of it could have been planned. When they said yes, I was amazed. I don’t think Tom Wilhite was even the head of the department that made the decision to make Frankenweenie, it was somebody else. It was odd, none of it made any sense. To this day I’m really bad if people ask, ‘How did you become this?’ I really have no answer. There’s no point A to point Β kind of history to it. There’s no kind of training that I could look at. It was a completely surreal fluke, the whole thing.
Frankenweenie, which Burton feels could have been stretched out to feature length if he had been given a few extra days ‘shooting, updates Mary Shelley’s classic story to modern-day suburbia, and follows the adventures of ten-year-old Victor Frankenstein (Barrett Oliver) as he reanimates his pet dog, a bull terrier named Sparky who has been run down and killed in a car accident, in his parents, attic. The film opens with Victor showing his parents a Super 8 movie he’s made entitled Monsters From Long Ago, featuring Sparky, dressed up as a prehistoric monster and being attacked by a creature straight out of a Godzilla movie. Later, after Sparky has been brought back to life, he is covered in stitching, with a bolt on either side of his neck, a homage to Jack Pierce’s make-up for Boris Karloff as the Creature in Whale’s Frankenstein films.
You have a dog that you love, and the idea of keeping it alive was the impulse for the film. Again, growing up watching those horror movies, for some reason I was always able to make direct links, emotionally, between that whole Gothic/Frankenstein/Edgar Allan Poe thing and growing up in suburbia. Frankenweenie was just another outgrowth of that.
But it’s very, very important to me, even though there are feelings from Frankenstein, that I do not make direct linkage to it. In anything I have ever done, people have always said, ‘That’s like this sequence in that movie’, and it may well be true. But something that’s always been very important to me is not to make a direct linkage. If I was to sit down with somebody, and we were to look at a scene from Frankenstein and say ‘Let’s do that’, I wouldn’t do it, even if it’s a homage or an inspired-by kind of thing. In fact, if I ever use a direct link to something, I try to make sure in my own mind that it’s not a case of ‘Let’s copy that’. Instead it’s,
‘Why do I like that, what’s the emotional context in this new format?’ That’s why I always try to gauge if people get me and are on a similar wavelength. The writer Lenny Ripp was that way. He got it. He didn’t want to sit there and go over Frankenstein; he knew it well enough. It’s more like it’s being filtered through some sort of remembrance.
Frankenweenie: Victor
Frankenweenie: Sparky
For Frankenweenie, I didn’t look at anything. I remember thinking the skies in Frankenstein were really cool because they were painted. But I didn’t go and look at the film because I didn’t want to say, ‘Do it like that.’ I wanted to try to describe it the way I remembered. So I would describe something, and say, ‘It was like a painted backdrop, but the clouds were more pronounced. It was a much more intense, wild sky.’ Then when I finally looked at Frankenstein I saw that the sky was not quite the way I had described it. That was my impression, but I would still rather go with that. I feel when somebody is just borrowing something, they don’t have any feeling for it themselves.
Sparky, covered in stitching
Much like Whale’s Frankenstein (and indeed like Edward Scissorhands), Frankenweenie climaxes with the inevitable showdown between the mob – or in this case, Victor’s frightened and angry neighbours – and ‘the monster’ – Sparky – at a miniature golf course which resembles the setting from Whale’s movie. It then culminates in Sparky finding true love in the shape of a poodle whose hairdo resembles that of Elsa Lanchester in The Bride of Frankenstein. These references, according to Burton, were again less of a direct link to Whale’s films, than a reaction to what he saw around him in Burbank.
Sparky and his bride
What was great was that you almost didn’t even have to think about it, because growing up in suburbia there were these miniature golf courses with windmills which were just like the one in Frankenstein. These images just happened to coincide, because that was your life. There were poodles that always reminded you of the bride of Frankenstein with the big hair. All those things were just there. That’s why it felt so right or easy for me to do – those images were already there in Burbank.
Frankenweenie marked the first time Burton had worked with a professional cast – which included Shelley Duvall and Daniel Stem as Victor’s parents, and director Paul Bartel as his teacher – and yet he managed to elicit a number of tender, Sympathie performances, from Barrett Oliver, as Victor, in particular.
The Bride of Frankenstein
They were all great. I’ve been very lucky in that way with actors. I’ve rarely had experiences where you meet people and it’s like the clichéd, horrible, bite-your-head-off kind of thing. It’s really shaped my attitude about working with people, actors especially. They need to feel the same about me as I feel about them. If they don’t like me, if they’re not into me, then I don’t want to work with them. All of these people, they knew I had never done anything before, but they liked the idea. They felt that I cared – it’s just a little thing, but it’s important to me, because there are lots of great actors and you have to connect with them and they need to connect with you. That whole thing of seeking attention, I have never been into that. It’s so hard to make something that everybody should be trying to work in the same spirit. And those people were great; everybody was for the project. I think what they did was make me feel comfortable, and I started to learn that you have to communicate with people.
Frankenweenie: Daniel Stern, Shelley Duvall, Barrett Oliver, and Sparky
Frankenweenie shares with Vincent a strong emotive core, a result of their profoundly personal origins. Yet Burton, much like he would later do with Edward Scissorhands and The Nightmare Before Christmas, passed on the task of writing the screenplay to someone else.
I never considered myself a writer, even though I do write things. I wrote Vincent. Some time I may try it more. But I feel whether or not you write it, you have to feel like you wrote it. I mean, everything I do, I feel like it’s me. I guess it was easier and more fun and I could, hopefully, see it a little more clearly by having somebody else write it. I’ve always felt as long as they get me and get what it is that I feel, then they can bring something to it themselves. Then it’s better. It opens it up a little bit more.
Originally intended to be shown with Pinocchio on its re-release in 1984, Frankenweenie was shelved by Disney when it received a PG rating.
Perception is the one thing that I can’t think about, because if I do, it drives me crazy. I can’t find logic in how things happen. For instance, it freaked everybody out that Frankenweenie got a PG rating, and you can’t release a PG film with a G-rated animated film. I was a little shocked, because I don’t see what’s PG about the film: there’s no bad language, there’s only one bit of violence, and the violence happens off-camera. So I said to the MPAA, ‘What do I need to do to get a G rating?’ and they basically said, ‘There’s nothing you can cut, it’s just the tone.’ I think it was the fact that it was in black and white that freaked them out. There’s nothing bad in the movie. There was a test screening where they showed Pinocchio and then Frankenweenie. If you ask any child, there are some very intense, scary things in Pinocchio. Our perception after not seeing it for a long period of time is that it’s a children’s classic. It’s the same way people feel about fairy tales. When you hear the words ‘fairy tale’, the first thing that comes to mind is a cute children’s story, which is not the way it is. It’s the same with Pinocchio. It is pretty soft, but there are some intense moments. I remember getting freaked out when I was a kid; I remember kids screaming. And in this test screening kids started crying at certain parts. For kids, it’s more horrific than anything in Frankenweenie, but because it wasn’t a tried and true children’s classic with the Good Housekeeping seal of approval, everybody got all freaked out and said, ‘We can’t release this.’
It was right at the time when the company was changing, when the people who are there now came in. So it met with the same response as Vincent in a way, which was ‘Oh, this is great, but we have no plans to release it. Ever.’ I remember being very frustrated because the old regime was out, the new one was in, and again, a thirty-minute short is not a high priority for people who are just coming into a studio and trying to make something of it.
By that point I was really tired of Disney. I felt like ‘Okay, this has been really, really great, I’m very, very lucky. Nobody’s had the opportunities that I’ve had. I feel great that I’ve been able to do this.’ But it was a case of doing a bunch of stuff that nobody would ever see. It was kind of weird.
Frankenweenie did receive a small release in the United Kingdom on a double bill with Touchstone Pictures’ Baby: Secret of the Lost Legend, and was finally made available on video in the US by Disney prior to the release of Batman Returns in 1992. Impressed by his visual style and his dealings with actors, Shelley Duvall invited Burton to direct an episode of Showtime’s Faerie Tale Theatre series that she hosted and executive-produced. Burton’s forty-seven-minute episode, Aladdin and his Wonderful Lamp, was his first experience of working with video tape and again featured model and effects work from Rick Heinrichs and Steve Chiodio.
Right after Frankenweenie, Shelley Duvall asked me to do one of the episodes for her Faerie Tale Theatre, which was really nice because they basically hired name directors like Francis Coppola and I felt honoured. It was interesting, but it was another case of me being in over my head because it was a tape show with three cameras. Again, some of it is okay and some of it is not. Some of it looks like a bad Las Vegas show. And that’s just because when I’m bad, I’m really bad. I can’t rise above it. I want to keep growing. Everybody wants to stretch. But if I’m not there, if I don’t feel right, then I can’t fake it too well.
But Shelley created a great atmosphere for that show. She got people there doing it for no money. She was good that way. It was hard work: one week, three cameras; it was intense, and what I realized was that I’m not a very good director-for-hire. I learned that early on. That’s why I’m very firm and say, ‘Look guys, if you’re going to let me do this, then let me do this and I’ll try to do the best I can. But it’s not going to help to treat me like you might treat a director-for-hire because, you know what, I’ll do a really lousy job, and we don’t want that.’ So I’ve always tried to protect myself in that sense, and I’m actually in awe of those old directors that could do a Western and then a thriller. It’s very admirable, and I’m fascinated by it. I just know I’m not that type.
Aladdin’s cast featured James Earl Jones (who provided the voice of Darth Vadar in the Star Wars trilogy) in two roles, including that of the genie of the lamp, and Leonard Nimoy (Star Trek’s Mr Spock) as the villainous Moroccan magician intent on possessing the lamp.
It’s surreal to work with those people who you’ve watched as you grow up, especially when you first get into it. But my first experience with Vincent Price on Vincent, that was the ultimate. My mind had been blown once before, so now these were kind of great little explosions. Again, I got a chance to see great actors at work; every actor has a different way of working and so I was observant and learnt from that.
While Aladdin is reminiscent of The Cabinet of Dr Caligari with its skewed set design, it features a number of other images that have, in one form or another, found their way into Burton’s subsequent work – bats, skeletons, skulls, spiders and topiaries.
Once that stuff is inside you, you don’t know how long it’s going to take to exorcize it. I remember thinking, ‘You know what, I’ve done this. I don’t feel this inside me any more. I don’t need to see another skeleton.’ But then there are times where it’s, ‘You know what, I just love those skeletons. I thought I was through with them, but I just love them.’
You never know when something is going to be exorcized out of you; those movies are a part of you, part of your make up. That imagery becomes a part of you; it’s not even something you think about too much. I try not to think, ‘Have I done this before?’, because I actually find it’s interesting for me to look back and see connections. I haven’t really done too much of that, but I do it a little bit. After I did three movies I started to see thematic kinds of things. The process I pretty much go through is: ‘Oh, that must mean something to me, deeply.’ I find you learn more about yourself if you don’t intellectualize right away, if you try to go more intuitively, and then you look back and see what themes and images keep coming up. Then I start to get psychologically interested in discovering what it means, where it’s founded. And I find that I learn more about myself. I don’t trust my intellect as much, because it’s kind of schizy; I feel more grounded going with a feeling.