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TIM BURTON'S STRANGE UNIVERSE

As the Museum of Modern Art stages a big retrospective of Tim Burton's work, Melinda Dodd considers a man who's made a career out of embracing his dark side ...

Special to MORE INTELLIGENT LIFE

“For some reason, early on, I was deemed as strange,” says Tim Burton, his eyes half-hidden behind blue-tinted sunglasses. We’re sitting in a dim theatre at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, where 14 of his feature films and more than 700 of his artworks are being shown in a new retrospective (on through April 26th 2010).

As a boy in placid Burbank, California, he was quiet and constantly sketching, often found feeding his obsession with B-movies, science-fiction and horror films. Little Tim, who would grow up to direct his own distinctively odd films, including "Beetlejuice", "Batman", "Edward Scissorhands", "Pee-wee's Big Adventure", "Corpse Bride" and "Sweeney Todd", faded into the background in his sunny hometown.

“I didn’t feel strange," he says. "But the lack of weather and culture in suburbia drew me into those worlds.”

Shy and soft-spoken, the 51-year-old director calls the museum's formal appreciation of his oeuvre an “out-of-body-experience”. But fans of his stylistic universe, with its appealing oddballs, dark humour and cheerful subversion, are flocking to see his drawings, paintings, photos, sculptures, short films and screenings, as well as the motley array of props and costumes lent by collaborators. Early influences are also on display; the museum is showing 27 of his favourite films, from "Frankenstein" to "Plan 9 from Outer Space" (directed by Ed Wood, the inspiration for his own film of the same name).

MoMA representatives were thrilled by the amount of art they discovered in Burton’s archives. “He started when he was 11 years old and never stopped,” says Ron Magliozzi, an assistant curator who spent a year combing through the director’s collections. “We were amazed by how much material he had—there were 10,000 sketches. I don’t think any other filmmaker has produced so much art off screen.”

Visitors expecting a thrill-ride through Burton’s world won’t be disappointed: the entrance to the exhibit (at right) is through the giant maw of a maniacal clown, and down a long striped gullet of a hallway. At the end, animatronic children from "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory" grin madly like terrified citizens of a totalitarian regime. Floating in the corner, the pumpkin-headed scarecrow from "Sleepy Hollow" conjures evil; nearby, Edward Scissorhands offers a cold embrace. Catwoman’s stitched-up suit from "Batman Returns", below him, is impossibly small.

Surrounding walls are papered with weird watercolours from "The Melancholy Death of Oyster Boy & Other Stories", a children's book with a cast of mutant kids, including the morose Melonhead (who gets squished to death) and the anti-superhero Stain Boy (pictured below). Complex storyboards and fine-boned character sketches, including a scowling Queen of Hearts from his new film, "Alice in Wonderland" (opening March 5th), showcase the director’s love of detail. By contrast his editorial notes, like this one for "Beetlejuice" (1988), are sweetly basic: “The simple story needs to be that 2 nice old-fashioned people die, and when an awful family moves in, they try to get rid of them,” Burton writes on a legal pad, reminding himself in the margins:  “Streamline!!!” and “This needs to be a human story.”

Because the prolific director kept nearly everything he ever created, it’s easy to see how his sharp-edged aesthetic emerged from clunky "Let's Draw!"-style illustrations. At 18 his derivative attempt at a children’s book, "The Giant Zlig", earned faint praise: "Considering that you suffer from a lack of the proper tools and materials, the art is very good," an editor offered. But as an animation student at the California Institute of the Arts he was able to embrace his dark side: “Teachers always said, ‘If you like what you do, be passionate about it',” Burton remembers. From then on, even a stint at Disney failed to blunt his pen.

Now he never stops creating, not even off-set. “Tim always has to have something to do,” notes Magliozzi. “He loves to have a pencil in his hand, something to touch and work on.” Among his private works, some never shown before, are velvet paintings of ghosts and skeletons, Polaroid tableaux of werewolves and Franken-women, and sculpted blue babies shot through with nails. “It gives me a sense of peace,” a serious Burton says, of creating for himself. “Growing up not being very verbal… [art] was cathartic.”

Burton asked the museum if he could design seven large pieces—including a glow-in-the-dark carousel and a crime-scene diorama—for the retrospective, even though he was deep in post-production work on "Alice" at the time. Then he animated the show's official website (which scored 25,000 hits in its first two days) and released a new book, "The Art of Tim Burton".

With so much going on, it’s clear that Burton is not the brooding auteur he has been made out to be. Magliozzi hopes the show corrects the misperception. “After having met him I said, ‘This is not a dark, Gothic person.’ Ultimately I think he’s a very optimistic artist. Whenever he’s faced with something depressing, his response is more creativity.”

"Tim Burton" is on view through April 26th at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.

Images credit: Derek Frey (top), Michael Locasiano (photograph, above right), Tim Burton and MoMA

(Melinda Dodd is a writer based in New York. Her last piece for More Intelligent Life was about the World Monuments Fund’s list of endangered sites. Jordan Hruska recently wrote about the lasting power of Pee-wee Herman.)