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Death becomes the imagination
of Tim Burton
by Luca Di Leonardo |
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| 14/12/2012 |
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At Edward Bloom’s funeral, his son Will must re-evaluate his whole life. He always thought his father a mad braggart capable of only inventing oddball characters and implausible stories. But when he finds himself immersed in a circus of bizarre characters, poor Will must (finally) accept his father’s legacy: magical stories set in a phantasmagoric yet real world.
The same thing often happens in movies. We read a film plot, or hear about a film and don’t believe it one bit. Then, like for Edward and Will in Big Fish, comes the latest film by Tim Burton. The story is so captivating and absurd that our curiosity needs to know what he’s created this time. We get to the movie theatre, the lights go down and the screen lights up with a vision of an “afterlife” that after a few seconds becomes the only possible world.
Ghosts, skeletons and the marginalized that increasingly resemble cadavers. This is the realm of Burton, the scruffy man who draws, describes and colors other worlds as if he himself were part of them.
A creator of dreams and nightmares, and animator of good monsters (worthy only of Steven Spielberg’s fantastical world), in a career that spans nearly 30 years, Tim Burton’s name has become synonymous with fantasy thanks to the masterful way in which he gives heart and movement to inanimate things, both in his storytelling, and the tools he chooses to tell them with (like the dolls of his stop-motion movies). He is a Geppetto who gives his Pinocchios various names, but they always share a common imprint. They are killers, inventors, nerds or rebellious little girls. They are all a little like him, he who we could even call Edward (like Scissorhands, or Bloom from Big Fish, or Ed Wood), to give him and his inventions a certain extraordinary aura in their ordinariness. They are “strange,” defenseless, misunderstood and always searching for something. They are free spirits, rebels and often dead (truly or symbolically), but of a death that does not exclude any possibilities.
A multi-media artist from an early age (New York’s MOMA recently held a retrospective of his work), the California-born director has taken countless audiences by the hand into movie theatres, making them fall in love with his gothic tastes and horror-esque, dreamlike stories that emphasize beauty and celebrate a certain cult of death that, through him, entertains and frightens. Such as The Corpse Bride, where death “becomes” the protagonist; his Joker-Nicholson (in Batman), who turns beauty and his perma-smile into a matter of principle; or Alice’s beauty (and purity), which makes the Red Queen of Wonderland so envious.
Machines are another distinctive mark of the director-child who plays with construction sets, and are the basis of many of his films, like the fairy-tale contraptions of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, the evil machines of the barber Sweeney Todd, or the tools of the scientist who created Edward Scissorhands. Machines that create the characters, ideas and stories of every single film. Often inspired by old horror movies - with echoes of expressionist cinema, literary adaptations or even remakes of old classics, and featuring his favorite actor Johnny Depp and music by his faithful composer Danny Elfman - Burton’s films can often explain death to children like no one else can.
As with any great filmmaker, his films are a genre in and of itself and as with all the stars of the silver screen, his stories are known throughout the world by audiences of all ages.
Following dead housemates (Beetlejuice), apocalyptic alien attacks (Mars Attacks!), mysterious investigations (Sleepy Hollow) and the marvelous otherworld of the darkest Alice ever, Courmayeur is proud to present the latest gem from the king of fantasy-horror: Frankenweenie.
A reworking of Burton’s short from the early 1980s, and developed in the Disney studios, the story is another “perfect death” for children (of Mini Noir and beyond). The director once again puts together the pieces, and once again sets into motion old storytelling mechanisms (following in the footsteps of the classic Frankenstein), to create another afterlife world. This time, a “noir”-and-white, 3D horror-comedy featuring the voices of Hollywood stars who work often with the director: Winona Ryder, Catherine O’Hara and Martin Landau.
The animated stop-motion film naturally features a score by Elfman, characters with big scary eyes á la Dr. Caligari and tenderness, in the form of a little boy who figures out how to bring the dog he loves back to life. All this with the Disney stamp of quality.
Hidden among the dark shadows of Mont Blanc, and cutting up the snow with his scissorhands, Edward-Tim once again makes the incredible possible.
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