Tim Burton Discussion

[Movie-Man]

Hold up, where the hell is Batman?

[Ben]

We already covered that, MM.

[Hoagiebot]

My favorite Tim Burton movie would have to be Batman Returns, which, as was noted by earlier posts, is unfortunately not on the poll list so I didn't vote.

[GeorgeC]

Finally... Something I agree with Burton about!



http://www.imdb.com/news/ns0000002/#ni0907032

Burton Upset About Politically Correct Parents

31 July 2009 6:26 PM, PDT


Moviemaker Tim Burton has blasted politically correct parents for ruining fright nights for their kids.

The director fears today's children rarely get to see films that scare them, insisting a little bit of terror is good for youngsters.

He tells WENN, "I don't know why adults keep fighting that. They keep fighting the fairy tales that have been told since the beginning of mankind. They're fighting Pinocchio. They forget what it's like to be kids. Kids like to be scared.

"Most great children's literature is politically incorrect, so I don't know why they can't get used to it by now.

"Dr. Seuss, there's something wrong with him. His stuff was, at the time, considered having communist implications. I don't see it myself but certain people do see those kinds of things.

"Real people, real life, your neighbours - that's scary."

And the Nightmare Before Christmas moviemaker insists such political correctness often makes it hard for him to do his job.

He explains, "When I was first doing stuff like Beetlejuice or Batman I used to get a lot of s**t for things being dark... When I was working on Nightmare Before Christmas I had endless arguments with the studio heads who said, 'You can't have a main character that's got no eyeballs. How is someone gonna feel about somebody with just eye sockets?'

"It's those kinds of things that really kind of wear you down."

[EricJ]

So--having no clue about why Tim suddenly felt like bending our ear about this out of a clear blue sky--let me guess:

He got deluged with whines about his steamrollering "Alice", narcissistically jumped to the conclusion that the issue was "I'm too Gothy for my shirt", jumped into his own imaginary Edward Scissorhands fantasy world and assumed he was being publicly "persecuted" by those timid, repressed Avon Ladies who "want safe stories".

(No, Tim: We'd rather have the ORIGINAL stories. Try giving us one sometime.
Oh, and thanks for at least admitting you can't deeply fathom Seuss either. Confession is good for the soul.)

[eddievalient]

I think Burton has a point. Kids today are too sheltered and I fear that many of them will grow up with serious neuroses as a result. The scariest part is that one of them is eventually going to be president.

[Ben]

Totally with Tim here.

Eric...can you basically give the Burton-bashing a rest? Tired and boring.

First, it's not out the blue. Burton's on the Alice publicity trail and so we'll get more and more about this until release date. You should know the drill by now, so get with the program.

If you want a basic version of Alice or whatever, get a hack to work to a script. But...<I>it's been done</I>!

If you hire Burton, Gilliam, or one of those visionaries, then you're going to get the Burton, Gilliam or whoever's version. And those <I>haven't</I> been done.

[EricJ]

Thing is, he's indulging a little TOO much in Return to Oz Syndrome, by automatically grabbing the wishful-nostalgia stick that whatever made a children's book he hasn't read in years "nostalgic" was that it must've been Like, Really Scary, as it was Written By Delusional Psychotics--
Oz was Scary! Wonderland was Twisted! Dahl was Drug-Laced! Seuss was Weird!, etc...

I work in children's books, so I've never gotten away from it and remember exactly what I read as a kid, and I can't think of any classic I ever latched onto as being "scary":
I sorta-liked Dahl for its wiseass-cheekiness, I liked Carroll for its incredibly awful puns and logic you had to work on for a while, liked Seuss for attaching a sensible more-you-know message to addictively silly syncopation, and never much read Oz, but appreciated it was trying to be a Yankee Midwest-horse-sense spin on post-Victorian fantasy...
(As for "Grimm scary-tales", I remember liking the dragon in the Disney version of Sleeping Beauty, and was kinda disappointed to find out it wasn't in the text.)

Yes, name authors DO rationally know what they're doing when they write their books, much as wishfully deconstructing poseurs live to believe they didn't.
And it's not the first time Tim has spouted off his Big Gothy Mouth about something he didn't bother to research too deeply, because he was having too much fun in his pop-interpretation world.

[Ben]

So...don't go watching Burton interpretations!

Oz was Scary! Wonderland was Twisted! Dahl was Drug-Laced! Seuss was Weird!, etc...

Well...<I>they were</I>, mixing them around a little bit.

[EricJ]

So...don't go watching Burton interpretations!

Oz was Scary! Wonderland was Twisted! Dahl was Drug-Laced! Seuss was Weird!, etc...

Well...<I>they were</I>, mixing them around a little bit.

Again, not really:
"Wonderland" only felt disjointed because Carroll was trying to write down and string together a set of improvised backseat-car stories from the boat picnics into an A-B narrative--
The scene in the Tea Party, where the Hatter and Hare narrate a story with interruptions from Alice ("But didn't the sisters live in the well?" "So they did--Well in.") is about the closest thing to a fly-on-the-wall transcript of Dodgson's ad-libbed story-sessions with the Liddells.

Mystery-writer Dahl, meanwhile, thought he was impishly "shocking" late-60's children by tapping into the 10-yo. urge for over-the-top humor/grossout, and hit upon a cultural discovery that the next three decades would realize:
No one ever accused the Dursleys in "Harry Potter" of being "sick and twisted", and show me one contemporary British children's humor-fantasy author today (Eva Ibbotson, anyone?) who doesn't plagiarize Dahl right down to the Veruca Salts.

Recently got into another discussion with some slacker-generation kid who thought "Seuss musta been on drugs"--Had fun explaining to him how "Horton Hears a Who" was, according to Geisel, "really" about Stalinist Russia, and letting him figure that one out.

And Oz?--Yeah, I know, but that pushes my button right there:
LFB was always up front about why he'd written the stories, and pointed out that in 1910, every "classic" book children were expected to love were British (Alice, Peter Pan, Robin Hood, etc.)...
He'd already had two other published books before Oz, but subtitled it "An American fairy tale", as it was culturally important to him to have a show-me Kansas farmgirl in Wonderland for the first time.
(But, by 1910 standards, things were never allowed to be too violent--The villain would usually get some harmless dispatching or be given a spell to make him forget he had ever been bad, etc.)

Oh, and in case you haven't caught on by now, I write children's books on the side. I know how the mindset works from the inside.
Don't mess with the Brotherhood, pal.

[ShyViolet]

I agree with Tim as well. The thought of a darker Alice (and if you think about it the books are pretty dark with all their themes of child psychology and growth) definitely intrigues me, especially since I loved what he did with Charlie. Burton's films aren't just unsettling because they're "dark", however, but because of characters that are often pure and innocent despite the incredibly twisted settings. That's absolutely perfect for Alice. Funny how Burton is often attacked no matter what he does--his Batman/Batman Returns were either too dark and weird or, when being compared to The Dark Knight (as much as I liked it) too cartoony and campy. In some ways Burton's film was darker than Nolan's because Nolan's message goes down easier than Burton's. BB and especially TDK stressed that "We need the darkness so we can see the light." In Burton's films, there is no light because Gotham City and its citzens are by and large evil and shallow. This is much harder to digest than Batman letting himself be hunted down so people can continue to believe in Harvey Dent.

I also agree that critics/society nowadays are way too skittish with children's entertainment. What made Walt's films incredible is not only love/romance/happiness, but all the fear and anxiety experienced in between those scenes. Happy endings are only part of Disney films, so it's weird how people think "Disney/happy endings" when it's anything but. Watching animated films from the 80s like An American Tail and All Dogs Go to Heaven makes me wonder whether or not these films would EVER have been made nowadays, and I seriously doubt it. Even with their merits, they are often disturbing and quite depressing. Even Great Mouse Detective had scary moments which I doubt would have seen the light of day nowadays.

"Wonderland" only felt disjointed because Carroll was trying to write down and string together a set of improvised backseat-car stories from the boat picnics into an A-B narrative--
The scene in the Tea Party, where the Hatter and Hare narrate a story with interruptions from Alice ("But didn't the sisters live in the well?" "So they did--Well in.") is about the closest thing to a fly-on-the-wall transcript of Dodgson's ad-libbed story-sessions with the Liddells.

There's much more to it than that. Alice was a character in her own right, which is why she's been around so long. The book isn't just puns and stories but an exploration of childhood growth. There's tons of interpretations of it, from politics (the Caucus race, etc...) to class issues to game theory (which makes sense since Dodgson was also a mathematician). That's why it's so respected both as a children's book and as a valid text.

[Ben]

Going back to Eric's post...that's why these authors have lasted so long...they obviously have their disctinctive way of writing, and a director like Burton obviously has his own way of interpreting.

Moving on, moving on...