Sunday, July 26th, 2009 (Short Film Sunday: Vincent)

Last week's short film, Treevenge, was directed by Jason Eisener, a director that I feel one day may become a big name. This week however, I am going to feature a filmmaker that most up and comers hope to emulate, the masterful Tim Burton. Almost everything the 50-year-old director has touched, has become something of a masterpiece, or cultural phenomenon. This past week has been no exception, as during the San Diego Comic Con, the trailer to his newest film, Alice in Wonderland, an adaptation of Lewis Carroll's whimsical novel, made its debut. Burton's official website also released a teaser gallery from his upcoming picture book, The Art of Tim Burton.

Burton had just as interesting of an early career years before he got to this point. His career began as a cell animator for the 1978 animated version of The Lord of the Rings, directed by Ralph Bakshi. Then, I have read rumors for years that he was an uncredited Muppeteer in 1979's The Muppet Movie, and the listing still exists on IMDb, as well as on Burton's Wikipedia page. Leaving the 70's behind, Burton got a job as an animator on the Disney film The Fox and the Hound. While working for Disney, we would also get our first look at Burton behind the camera, taking the helming role when he would shoot tonight's featured short, Vincent, about a young boy named Vincent Malloy, that was obsessed with Burton's real life hero, horror icon Vincent Price, who also narrated the story. The film saw a brief theatrical release running before the forgotten Matt Dillon film Tex, but the brilliant short went mainly unseen, as some of the more macabre references to Price's films wasn't very Disney-friendly, and the crowd wanting to see the badly received teen drama Tex didn't mesh with Burton's humor.

The film would lead to another Disney short called Frankenweenie in 1984, which would lead to Burton being fired by Disney for wasting the company's money and creating a film that was too scary for the audience in which it was intended. Both shorts would later find success and cult followings once they showed up on the special edition DVD for The Nightmare Before Christmas, and of course, the popularity of YouTube. They would also succeed in getting Burton noticed by Paul Reubens, a bizarre comedian that went under the pseudonym Pee-Wee Herman, who also famously created an act that looked like it should be targeting children, but kept an adult audience with its wit. He was impressed and got Burton to direct a screen adaptation of The Pee-Wee Herman Show, Burton's first feature film, Pee-Wee's Big Adventure. This would be followed with a second huge cult hit in Beetlejuice, and rounding out the 80's, Burton would hit his first blockbuster gold with the film Batman.

The 90's would follow with another pairing with Price, this time in a small, and Price's last, on-screen role in Burton's masterful story Edward Scissorhands, a dark big budget sequel in the Caped Crusader franchise with Batman Returns, his return to stop motion animation in the classic Nightmare Before Christmas (a film that centered around the character Jack Skellington, whom made his debut as a background character in Vincent), his first flop that still has some following in Cabin Boy, creating a great homage to cult film icon Edward D. Wood, Jr. in Ed Wood, stepping down to producer in the moderately successful Batman Forever, returning to praise cult cinema with the star-studded Mars Attacks!, and rounding out the decade with another clever, dark adaptation in his first horror film, Sleepy Hollow.

In the new millennium, Burton gave us the only film of his that I have disliked, a re-envisioning of the classic Planet of the Apes, the very whimsical tale of growing old in his underrated Big Fish, another lavish and unique telling of a classic story in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, another return to the world of stop motion with Tim Burton's Corpse Bride, the horror musical Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, and rounding out the decade by producing Shane Acker's upcoming film 9.

To think, such a grand career from roughly six minutes of animation, and a clever poem about his hero. Without further adieu, one of Burton's best, albeit short, works Vincent.