“These are just great,” said an art teacher to the teenage Tim Burton about his drawings. “You keep it up and don’t ever stop.” He didn’t. He kept on drawing, on napkins and menus, in hundreds of sketchbooks; on the classified ads pages of the Los Angeles Times. He also made his drawings into films such as Beetlejuice, Edward Scissorhands and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, whose dark, gothic, cobwebby looks earned the epithet “Burtonesque”. Plots, characters and dialogue, although his movies are furnished with them, are not for Burton the main thing. “The images for me are the story,” he once said.
They help explain why the Design Museum in London is hosting an exhibition devoted to the film-maker. His films, you could say, are designed before they are directed, and the museum has no trouble filling a good chunk of its display space with 600 exhibits from Burton’s own archive, those of the film studios he has worked with, and the private collections of his collaborators. There are models, mannequins, outfits, film clips and many, many drawings – artefacts of a maker for whom the physical and material have always been important.
The World of Tim Burton is not in fact a wholly new production, but the latest (and, we’re told, the last) iteration of a show that has been touring the world for the past decade, in locations including Prague, Osaka, São Paulo and Seoul. Originated by Tim Burton Productions, it has some of the air of a franchise, but the Design Museum is keen to stress that it has been adapted, updated and expanded, “subtly reframed through the lens of design” and “fully reimagined”.
The exhibition starts with Burton’s childhood in Burbank, a suburb on the outer orbit of the Los Angeles conurbation. It was a place he names, in a clip of an interview with Melvyn Bragg, “anywhere USA”; “a floaty, kind of semi-oppressive blank palette”, as Burton also once called it. The future director (born 1958), a solitary misfit, found refuge in his drawing, conjuring realms of monsters as far away as could be from the shallow pastel walls of his environment, sometimes going to the nearby Valhalla Memorial Park cemetery for peace and reflection. It’s easy to see the landscape of his upbringing in Edward Scissorhands, set in a settlement of houses painted in sugary colours borrowed from the popular American candy Necco wafers and its residents’ cars and clothes matching hues, with which the shadowy, monochrome ruin inhabited by the eponymous hero could not be a greater contrast.
It’s now a familiar enough story, this unearthing of dark otherworlds behind the sunny facades of suburbia (see also David Lynch, Stephen King), but Burton lived it more fully than most. The exhibition shows teenage creations such as The Giant Zlig, an unpublished Dr Seuss-inspired children’s book, and CRUSH LITTER, his competition-winning poster design from the 70s for Burbank Beautiful Inc. It then follows his progress, as a moody and taciturn twentysomething animator at Disney, then to his 1985 feature film debut with Pee-wee’s Big Adventure, to Beetlejuice in 1988 and Batman in 1989, to the cavalcade of fantastical black horror-comedies that followed.
You learn something of his inspirations – Edgar Allan Poe‘; the melancholy Victoriana of the writer and illustrator Edward Gorey; surrealism; the films of Vincent Price; trashy 1950s sci-fi – an all-you-can-eat buffet, in fact, of things spooky and sometimes a bit silly. You learn, too, about the collaborators who bring Burton’s visions to life, such as the costume designer Colleen Atwood and the puppet-makers and stop-motion animators Mackinnon and Saunders. You see outfits – works of Frankensteinian slashing and remaking – in which body and clothing merge, such as the white-stitched, figure-hugging black PVC ensemble worn by Michelle Pfeiffer as Catwoman in Batman Returns, Christina Ricci’s dress from Sleepy Hollow, and Johnny Depp’s costume in Edward Scissorhands.
The exhibits are placed in a Burtonesque installation that includes white timber frames evocative of suburban houses, a dark cavernous room populated by drawn and modelled figures, and an enfilade of wonky portals, its floor in a warped checkerboard pattern, doubled by a mirrored wall at the end. His private studio, which he sets up at home and when travelling, is recreated – a space dense with drawing materials and sketches. If Burton, as the exhibition text puts it, is a maker of worlds, you are definitely immersed in several of them.
Running through the whole 50-year span of the show are the drawings: a continuous scribble from his 1970s adolescence to the present; a never-ending doodle spun into a stellar career. They show an enduring fascination with oversized body parts – eyes, mouths, heads, breasts – with tendrils, fangs, bones and blobs, with rips and repairs in skin, flesh and clothing. They’re impressive for their intensity and energy, but also don’t show much by way of development, which might also be true of Burton’s work as a whole. It’s striking how much Wednesday, his 2022 Netflix series, reprises the look of his earliest films (even allowing for the possibility that self-reference was part of the concept), including the pale, dark-haired solemn teen heroine, previously incarnated by Winona Ryder and Christina Ricci and now by Jenna Ortega.
Burton’s handiworks don’t entirely stand up to the exposure that a show of this scale provides. He doesn’t have the range and invention of Stanley Kubrick, who the Design Museum featured in 2019. What this exhibition does offer is a tour of the phenomenal output of a singular creative mind, one that has given considerable pleasure to what are now generations of audiences.
