Tim Burton is a visual inventor, an animator by training. Consequently, his best films have the gaudy, manic quality of a disturbed Disney, all primary colours, too many fizzzy drinks and a love of the macabre and the monstrous
From Beetlejuice to Big Fish, his films are a heady brew of old horror flicks and twisted fairy tales. And yet, for all the bucking of conventions, Burton is a story-teller at heart, and his most succesfull films have the timeless quality of fairy tales.
Burton, who'd begun his career as an animator for Disney, made his first feature film with Pee-wee's Big Adventure (1985), a surprise success, and he followed that three years with the hallucinatory comedy Beetle Juice (1988), a film which introduced mainstream audiences to Burton's delicious mixture of the gothic and the silly.
His next film was Batman, starring Michael Keaton as the Caped Crusader and Jack Nicholson as The Joker. Despite Burton's nightmarish vision of a rain-soaked Gotham, the film was perhaps too campy to be truly engaging, a fault that Burton rectified with his next film, his masterpiece: Edward Scissorhands.
The film starred Johnny Depp as the unfinished boy whose creator dies before he can finish his hands. Thus Edward is forced into the world with blades and knives where his hands should be, unable to touch without inflicting wounds and pain. The film follows his quest to fit into the suburban society of 50s America, and has the tragic feel of a fable.
This was followed by two of his best films. The Nightmare Before Christmas is an animated musical about the king of Halloween Town, Jack Skellington, and his struggle to understand Christmas. The following year, Burton reunited with Johnny Depp on the film Ed Wood (1994), a biopic about the director of such amazingly awful z-list pictures as Plan 9 From Outer Space.
Burton's subsequent film, Mars Attacks! (1996), was a comic homage to classic sci-fi, with hordes of green little men coming to earth and wreaking havoc. This was followed by a dark adaptation of Sleepy Hollow (1999), starring Johnny Depp as the man of science trying to aprehend the headless horseman.
The next film was the mega-budget but disappointing remake of Planet Of The Apes, followed by the much better Big Fish (2003); more conventional perhaps, but still sweet and quirky. That was followed by the massively succesful Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, another collaboration with Johnny Depp.
