Salute Your Shorts: Tim Burton's Short Films (Part 2, 1983-2010)

Salute Your Shorts is a weekly column that looks at short films, music videos, commercials or any other short form visual media that generally gets ignored.

Last week, we took a look at Tim Burton’s early, pre-professional works, a combination of odd side projects and student films he worked on for the first twenty-four years of his life. But the success, relative though it may have been, of “Vincent” made Burton a professional director and led his career on a very different path than those of the rest of the animators at Disney. For reasons still somewhat unclear, Disney continued to see Burton as a young director worth cultivating and so they continued patronizing his largely independent films, effectively giving him a film school training but with a studio budget.

One thing it’s impossible to see outside of the MOMA Tim Burton exhibit is his 1983 release “Hansel and Gretel,” which was made for the then-newly formed Disney Channel. Although Disney thought that “Vincent” was too dark for a wide release with one of their films, the company saw how well-made it was and assigned him to “Hansel and Gretel,” which was also made off the lot, this time for $116,000. But while Burton had proven adept at directing animation, which he had been schooled in, here he would for the first time be working with actors on a professional project—intentionally bad acting wasn’t an option. Burton’s adaptation of the fairy tale is set in a highly stylized Japanese world populated with Transformers toys and staring various non-actors. By all accounts the film is extremely strange and not very successful, to the point that Burton until now has kept it from being re-released following its original screening on the Disney Channel at 10:30 pm on Halloween. In the end, “Hansel and Gretel” nearly convinced Burton that he shouldn’t be a director.

At this point, Burton managed to somehow fail upwards. “Hansel and Gretel” was, to a greater or lesser extent, a disaster, but Disney still put its faith in the director, even for live-action films. Burton’s next work was “Frankenweenie,” which despite its much more obvious b-movie homage, was a great deal more successful than anything else he’d directed in live-action before. The movie is effectively a remake of Frankenstein, except that here the child Victor brings his dog Sparky back to life after he’s hit by a car. However, the town is unwilling to accept Sparky in his newly undead form and sets a lynch mob after him, until he redeems himself at the film’s end by saving Victor’s life. The short is in many ways a trial run for the themes that would later be played out in Edward Scissorhands, but this time on a much smaller scale and, as necessitated by being a kid’s movie, a happy ending. Budgeted at nearly a million dollars, and in 1984 money no less, the short is in fact one of the most well-funded short films ever made, a strange anomaly where a studio gave an unknown director a large budget to make an almost necessarily uncommercial work. “Frankenweenie” was originally intended to be screened before the 1984 re-release of The Jungle Book and later Pinocchio, but test screenings showed it to be a mismatch with the traditional Disney tone, even if it’s the most white-washed of Burton’s works.

“Frankenweenie”’s flaws, including some shaky camerawork and largely terrible acting, are overridden by the good spirits and fun of the film’s screenplay. As with many of Burton’s works, the film is definitely made for children and its moments are sculpted not by anything approximating reality but rather how kids see the world. There’s no depth to the movie, but there is a good emotional ride through the world of a suburbia Burton knew well, and like “Vincent,” it’s the story of how a child can take his favorite stories and live them out. The film’s windmill sequence would later be brought back for Sleepy Hollow, and it’s clear that Burton is very fond of this work from the planned full-length animated version he’s been hinting at now for several years. I don’t think it’s a film that has aged very well, but you can easily see why it helped Burton’s career so much.

“Frankenweenie” was the last project Burton did with Disney. Well, the last while he was an employee rather than a director under contract, but despite severing his ties with the Mouse, it still opened up some new opportunities. Shelley Duvall, who starred as the mother in “Frankenweenie,” was impressed by Burton, likely because of the short’s mix of fanciful horror and kid-friendliness, and invited Burton to direct an episode of her series, Faerie Tale Theatre. The show was one of the earliest examples of the revival of anthology shows that happened during the 1980s and early '90s, with each episode made from an entirely different cast and crew. Aside from more obvious advantages and disadvantages, anthology shows offered a place for up-and-coming directors to work in a professional environment (the best examples of this being the careers of both Alfonso Cuaron and Guillermo del Toro, which began with the horror anthology Hora Mercada). Burton took over an adaptation of “Aladdin” and with a cast including James Earl Jones and Leonard Nimoy, well, once again he put out a rather poor live-action affair.

Burton’s “Aladdin and His Wonderful Lamp” isn’t terrible, but it is rather disappointing and one of the least Burton-ish things he’s ever directed. Most of the show’s plot follows along a similar adaptation to the one that ironically Disney made famous a few years later (co-directed by John Musker, who appeared in “Luau”), though it’s in fact closer to the original version from One Thousand and One Arabian Nights. The main things that Burton added were changing the characters’ portrayals, the most noteworthy being Jones’ genie. Rather than the affable, fun-loving Robin Williams version, here, Jones gives a truly dark and twisted performance that’s still over-the-top but in a much more interesting way. Jones’ genie is dangerous and capricious, just barely under Aladdin’s control and more than willing to off any one of his masters. Conversely, rather than a street-wise urchin, Robert Caraddine plays Aladdin as an unwitting buffoon.

Sadly, more memorable than anything other than Jones’ performance is the entire affair’s low-rent appearance. Beginning with Batman, Burton has always been blessed with huge budgets, and when they drop below the multi-million-dollar mark, his intense focus on mise-en-scene just looks disappointing while the lack of time spent on performances makes actors less talented than Johnny Depp look out of place. Combined with a leisurely-paced script, these make Burton’s “Aladdin” a disappointing affair. There are still a few traces of Burton’s personality in the film, most noteworthy in the shadow play in the treasure cave and the television/puppet box owned by the sultan, but they’re not enough to merit something with lines of dialogue like, “Tell me, mysterious medallion.”

Luckily for Burton, this short didn’t come into play for Paul Reubens, who tapped the director for Pee Wee’s Big Adventure on the strength of "Frankenweenie" and in the need to complete negotiations over the picture before funding for it fell through. Though shot before Pee-Wee’s, “Aladdin” didn’t air until the next year where it remained largely forgotten. Burton was still looking for work, though, and found his way onto another anthology show, this time The New Alfred Hitchcock Presents. The two shows in fact do a good job summarizing Burton’s interests, in both entertaining children and exploring suspense and the macabre. Burton was given a remake of a 1964 episode to do, titled “The Jar” and based on a Ray Bradbury short story.

The original “Jar” focused on a country bumpkin who buys a jar from a travelling carnival, the contents of which appear different to everyone who sees them. Burton’s remake took this in a more interesting direction, where a found-art sculptor buys a jar from a junk salesman and puts it into the center of his latest exhibit. As before, no one is certain what’s in the jar but they can’t look away. However, his girlfriend and exhibitor hates the jar and breaks it open, at which point the artist kills her and puts her head into the jar, which remains mesmerizing to everyone who sees it. There’s also some implications that what’s originally in there was perhaps the result of Nazi experiments gone awry, but the show’s 24-minute length is too short to get into this.

Twenty-four minutes were a boon to Burton here, though, as the short is a lot tighter than both of his previous television projects and because of this maintains tensions that are absent in everything he’d directed before. Burton’s strength as a director has never been as a great storyteller, but this focus caused him to zero in on what made the object interesting. He still didn’t have the handle on performances, unfortunately, but the exhibit and jar are thoughtfully shot with a lot more certainty than his earlier works. Combined with smoother editing, the short is fairly polished and though again it doesn’t feel much like Burton’s later works, at least it’s done well. Burton is as unhappy with “The Jar” as he was with “Aladdin,” but I think this is more due to the low-rent look of the show than of the actual content.

“The Jar” had the side effect of putting Burton into contact with Michael McDowell, who was one of the writers on Beetlejuice and was later tapped by Burton to write The Nightmare Before Christmas. At that point, Burton’s star was ascending and he stepped away from directing shorts and television, not to mention even directing the film with his name in the title, for many years. His next non-feature film was in fact a commercial made for Hollywood Chewing Gum made in 1998. The commercial stars a gnome escaping from his yard to spy on Snow White bathing. Other than continuing Burton’s interest in adapting fairy tale’s there’s not too much to it, but the commercial is worth a quick look. Burton also directed two more commercials for Timex in 2000, both rather poor and extremely blatant Matrix knock-offs. I’ve never really heard why they were made, but they’re definitely some of the less interesting things Burton has ever been behind.

Much more intriguing was the series of flash-video shorts that came out the same year. During his period of frustration while attached to direct a Superman film, Burton wrote and illustrated The Melancholy Death of Oyster Boy and Other Stories as an outlet for his frustrations. With rhymes and drawings derived from Edward Gorey, Burton filled out his frustrations, and with Stain Boy in particular he wrote about the type of hero he wanted to work with, one who “next to Superman and Batman … must seem quite tame.” His super power is only to create a wet stain where he goes and the ability to control where it heads with his mind. When Shockwave asked him about directing a series in the company’s quest for legitimacy, he went with Stainboy and alongside a group of flash animators brought his character into motion.

Stainboy’s six adventures, out of an originally proposed 26-episode series, largely follow a pattern. First Stainboy is offered a mission by the police officer Dale, then he kills his adversary, then he returns and is debriefed and insulted by Dale once more. The people Stainboy deals with are freaks like he is and all come from Burton’s book, but they’re infrequently deserving of death and Dale seems to be a much more horrible person than anyone else in the series.

The Stainboy series is in a lot of ways distasteful, but its spite was a rich vein for Burton to tap into, with more anger than anything else he’s directed. This can be felt in the drawings that were animated. These were filled with loathing and hatred, above all in the Dale character, who stares down at Stain Boy while shouting his commands in a dictatorial manner, disdainful of all that he sees. The final episode of Stain Boy breaks the pattern and goes back to Stain Boy’s origins, leading to the feeling that perhaps he can break away from destroying those who are like him and break away from Dale’s grasp. Unfortunately, the rest of the prospective series was never made, making the entire series feel incomplete.

Since the end of Stainboy, which I’m guessing was due to the expense required in the show’s production and the end of the dot-com bubble, Burton has only directed one non-feature work, the trifling and extremely disappointing music video for The Killers’ “Bones.” The video gives a stupidly literal take on the song’s subject matter and has little to recommend it aside from an increasingly dated CGI gimmick. Unsurprisingly, Burton hasn’t returned to music videos since then.

In all, it’s clear that Burton’s shorter works are rarely comparable to his features, and not just in scope. The director has trouble telling stories in shorter bursts and without studio backing simply lacks the resources to make things look as compelling as his best features do—low-rent Burton ultimately looks a lot like bad Ray Harryhousen. But even in his most disappointing pictures it’s easy to see elements of his personality in the works, small though they may be.