The Work of Tim Burton

Photo by Antony Crook; grooming by Susie Sobol; photographer's assistant: Alex John Beck

Tim Burton at the Museum of Modern Art, New York

Alfred Kubin The Pavilion Heats Up When In... Linz, Austria Tim Rollins and K.O.S. in New York

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To see more of the works included in the Tim Burton retrospective, click here.

In his version of Hansel and Gretel, the gingerbread man threatens to eat Hansel limb by limb while Gretel fends off a drag-queen witch with kung-fu.

For over a quarter century in Hollywood, Tim Burton has made weirdness good box office. Now his darkly comic sensibility is penetrating a temple of high culture. This month a retrospective including hundreds of the quirky auteur’s works of art — paintings, watercolors, Polaroids, pencil drawings, and amateur films — will take over the third floor and theaters of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The show offers a fresh perspective on the inspiration behind his many iconic movies — among them, Beetlejuice (1988), Batman (1989), Edward Scissorhands (1990), Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2005), and most recently, Sweeney Todd (2007).

When we meet, in an office overlooking the sculpture garden at MoMA, Burton is dressed in his usual attire: black jeans, a loose navy button-down shirt, a black blazer, black boots, and black sunglasses hidden by his explosive mop of black-gray hair. This look is his trademark. Burton, at 51, is still a happy-to-be-left-alone teenager at heart, more aware of his wildly imaginative internal dialogue than of any external analysis. He never quite completes his sentences. It takes sentences cutting back and forth — with animated hand gestures — for the big picture to unfold. And when it does, he comes across as refreshingly open, unpretentious, and unaffected.

Asked about his start as an animator — in 1979, straight out of the California Institute of the Arts, on a Disney fellowship — he says, "I couldn’t draw the Disney characters, and I couldn’t draw foxes to save my life. But I got lucky, because instead of firing me they let me just draw concepts for The Black Cauldron [an animated feature ultimately released in 1985]. Then I got to draw other things for other projects, so it was really just a time for me to explore ideas." For a kid who felt "foreign" growing up in Burbank, California — where Warner Bros. and NBC Universal had their studios and he lived with his parents in a house down the street from a cemetery — Disney was an unusually sunshiny path. Yet it turned out to be his creative incubator. "It was great, because no one was really telling me what to do, and I was left completely alone. But at the same time, after a couple years it got to be like working in a vacuum. I did all this work, and I realized none of it was going to be used in Black Cauldron," he says. "I felt like this weird creature that was lucky and could do whatever I wanted to do, but as long as I never left that room."

It was during this time that Burton created a few barely seen shorts, such as Hansel and Gretel (1982), a dreamlike live-action version of the Grimm Brothers’ fairy tale in which a demonic gingerbread man threatens to eat the Japanese Hansel limb by limb while Gretel fends off a drag-queen witch with kung fu. When Gretel finally pushes the witch into the burning furnace, the bulging walls of the candy house spurt Technicolor blood (fast-forward to the museum scene from Batman), and the siblings escape. From the outside, the hand-drawn house deliquesces like melted ice cream into the ground. It’s twisted, perverted fun — animation come to life. The 15-minute work is an embryonic Burton gem, rich with stylistic choices that would later become his hallmark: intricately textured set decoration and visually compelling, often surreal scenes that always have an element of cynical humor. Even early on, you can see his gift for making the preposterous seem entirely plausible.

"It’s hard to imagine that it was aired on the Disney Channel," Burton says now of Hansel and Gretel. "I think they showed it once at 3 a.m." Also while he was at Disney, Burton developed his black-and-white short Frankenweenie (1984), about a boy who revives his dead dog. It was Frankenweenie that turned Paul Reubens (a.k.a. Pee-wee Herman) on to Burton’s work and led to Burton’s first feature, Pee-wee’s Big Adventure (1985). He was bringing his fixation with "bad films" — monster, horror, and sci-fi movies — into the mainstream.