While settling in a movie night, we all get the desire: the skin-crawling sensation that won’t go away until the moment we draw our curtains, silence our phones, and let one of Tim Burton’s creations entrap us until the bitter end. We all know the style of these films as dark and unearthly, a chilling experience that draws our attention like no other, but we never stop to consider what makes these movies so enticing. To put it plainly, Tim Burton creates anomalies for the screen. He paints flawed and eclectic visuals all while ensuring normalcy doesn’t weave its way through the cracks. Just as Burton dissects the mundane life, I am going to dissect his fantastical fiction.
The aspect that stands out the most, of course, are the visuals. Burton is one of very few filmmakers who not only experiment with German expressionism but tether their stories to the style. German expressionism is an early twentieth-century art movement that advocated for the expression of real feelings in lieu of recreating reality. It focuses on portraying themes such as out-of-ordinary experiences, the naked body, raw emotion, fantasy, and more all through visual metaphors. These metaphors are often brought upon by heavy lines, strong contrasts, clashing colours, strange figures, and over-exaggerated features. Burton relies on this style to make his dream-like worlds (which are often linked to the mental state of the main character, thus adding personal vulnerability into the setting) come to life. Edward Scissorhands is an exceptional example; the warped and unnatural illustration of his house in comparison to the faded suburban homes that surround it symbolizes the alienation of Edward throughout the movie. Even before meeting him, we are able to infer that something is wrong with him simply from the visuals of over-exaggerated trees and clashing colours.
Secondly, he leaves the outcasts as outcasts. Where most movies portray their main characters as unparalleled heroes, Burton allows his characters to start and end as an anomaly. Rather than transforming them throughout the film, he focuses on changing the audience’s perspectives of the character instead. This subtle choice makes his films different from the rest because he makes space for the innate societal burdens that resonate with all of us.
Rather than taking the glasses off an already beautiful girl, he gives her another pair. Burton embraces what society often alienates and stigmatizes, transforming it into something we can appreciate. This is the case for many of his films: Emily from Corpse Bride stays dead, Beetlejuice remains cynical, and don’t even get me started on Miss Peregrine’s Home For Peculiar Children! He doesn’t take away what makes these characters unique for the sake of expectation, instead, he teaches us that these aspects of life and human nature exist whether we want them or not. He compels us to ask the question: what would we do when faced with these oddities—accept it, or let it unravel us all?
Finally, Burton revels in defamiliarization, an artistic technique that presents ordinary things in unfamiliar ways. In other words, defamiliarization works to “make strange” the world we think we know. By taking everyday things and presenting them in odd contexts, it forces the audience to think twice about what they’re watching. Much like Burton’s ability to change our perspective of a character by showing vulnerability or likeness to us, Burton often makes even the “normal world” off-putting in one way or another. This is to challenge our perception of what truly is normal.
For instance, in How the Grinch Stole Christmas, because the “Whos” all agree the Grinch is a misfit, we are led to believe that their world is “the normal,” and yet, Burton uses defamiliarization again to challenge our understandings of what a nose or hair-style or outfit should look like in order to present both sides as a sort of abnormality. This clever technique conveys the movie’s message that those we see as “different” deserve kindness just the same from the very first shots. This same technique is prevalent throughout many of his other films in order to push the understanding that a fixed perception of “normal” really only leads to the stigmatization of groups. By presenting everything as an oddity, Burton encourages us to view the world with more empathy and care.
So, the next time you watch a Tim Burton classic, don’t be surprised when the setting fills the space and you’re transported into a world of (somewhat unfolded) mystery.
For more information on German Expressionism.