Tim Burton Biography (2)
Burton grew up in Burbank, California, where he fed his ravenous imagination by watching classic horror films and drawing cartoons. His talent was formally recognized in the ninth grade when he won a prize for an anti-litter poster he designed for the local trash collectors, which adorned Burbank garbage trucks for an entire year.
Burton attended the Cal Arts Institute on a Disney fellowship and soon after joined Walt Disney Studios as an animator. It was during these early years at Disney that Burton came up with the idea for Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas, but the studio shelved the project for ten years until after the success of Batman. Burton gained experience early at Disney, working on such projects as The Fox and the Hound and The Black Cauldron, and made his directorial debut with the animated short Vincent, an homage to one of Burton's childhood heroes. Drawn in dark, tilted tableaus, the film told the story of a young boy who wanted to be just like Vincent Price. Narrated by Price himself, the film was a critical success and won a number of awards, including two from the Chicago Film Festival.
Burton's next project for Disney was Frankenweenie. His first foray into live-action, this inventive twist on Frankenstein tells the story of a young boy who brings his dead dog back to life.
Following Frankenweenie, Burton left Disney to pursue live-action films.
In 1985 Burton directed his first feature film, Pee-wee's Big Adventure, bringing Paul Reubens' cartoonesque creation, Pee-wee Herman, to movie life. The film was a hit at the boxoffice, and Burton was praised by critics for his original vision of the surreal yet poignant world in which Pee-wee lived.
The same visual power blossomed further into Beetlejuice (1988), starring Michael Keaton, Geena Davis, Alec Baldwin, and Winona Ryder. A supernatural comedy about a New England family doggedly haunted by an amoral ghost, Beetlejuice achieved an inventively skewed visual perspective as macabre denizens of the hereafter mingled with the mundane artifacts of life in small-town New England. Critics praised this Topper-turned-on-its-head for surpassing the very limits of absurdity without ever losing its affecting charms.
In 1989, Burton directed Batman, starring Jack Nicholson, Michael Keaton, and Kim Basinger. Burton's tale of the mythic vigilante drew audiences in with its vision of a futuristic landscape that straddled the line between gritty urban realism and fabled apocalypse. Following the triumph of Batman, the National Association of Theatre Owners (NATO) awarded Burton the Director of the Year Award. The film also won an Academy Award® for set design.
Burton next directed and produced Edward Scissorhands, unleashing another original myth for our modern times. This fantastic tale shorn out of suburbia and hazardous creativity, starring Johnny Depp, Winona Ryder, and Dianne Wiest, was one of the biggest hits of the 1990 Christmas season and was acclaimed for its wild vision and poignant fairy tale sensibility. In 1992, Burton once again explored the dark underworld of Gotham City in Batman Returns, the highest grossing film that year, starring Michelle Pfeiffer as the formidable Catwoman, and Danny DeVito as Penguin.
In 1993, roughly a decade after he had initially conceived of the story, Burton was able to resurrect and bring to the screen a groundbreaking work of stop-motion animation wonder, Tim Burton's The Nightmare before Christmas. This was almost immediately followed in 1994 by his film Ed Wood which Burton produced and directed, and which starred Johnny Depp as the infamous 1950's cross-dressing, cult movie director of Glen or Glenda and Plan Nine From Outer Space. The film garnered Academy Awards for Best Supporting Actor Martin Landau as Bela Lugosi, and Best Makeup.
In addition to directing, Burton also produced 1993's Cabin Boy and 1995's summer blockbuster Batman Forever as well as producing the 1996 release of James and the Giant Peach based on Roald Dahl's children's novel.
Burton's latest film, Mars Attacks!, a sci-fi comedy which he directed and also produced in conjunction with Warner Brothers, starred an elite array of twenty leading actors including Jack Nicholson, Glenn Close, Danny DeVito, Pierce Brosnan and Annette Bening. Mars Attacks!, in which Burton revisited the grade-B science-fiction movie classics of the '50's, was based on the original Topps trading card series of 1962.
In 1989 Burton formed Tim Burton Productions, his own production company based at Warner Brothers, which is engaged in the development of projects for film, television, animation, and books. Among his other projects, Burton released a children's book entitled The Nightmare Before Christmas featuring imaginative illustrations by Burton and published by Hyperion Books in 1993 simultaneously with the release of the Touchstone film. The most recent book added to Burton's repertoire is The Melancholy Death of Oyster Boy and Other Stories, a composite of illustrated vignettes with short stories of unusual characters stemming from Burton's imagination. The book, released in the fall of 1997, was published by Rob Weisbach Books, a division of the William Morrow Company.
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