As this delicious, suitably erratic exhibition shows, the mind of Tim Burton is a strange and wonderful place that never stops churning out fantastical, delightful, macabre ideas.
The director of Beetlejuice, Edward Scissorhands, the 1989 Michael Keaton/Jack Nicholson Batman and the recent Netflix series Wednesday is also an animator, painter, writer, sculptor, puppeteer, photographer and technological innovator.
This comprehensive show covers everything from juvenilia to a recent Vogue Italia photoshoot of his latest muse Monica Bellucci to coincide with her role – as one of his many self-assembling corpse brides – in this year’s Beetlejuice sequel.
In between, paraphernalia, imagery and video from Burton’s movies, from his other projects and from the cultural phenomena that inspired him are jammed in any old how: costumes and alien puppets from the explosive 1996 Mars Attacks! sit next to a big fish from the 2003 dud Big Fish. But even Burton’s flops are fascinating, as are the tantalising glimpses of unrealised projects like his Superman Lives movie.
The 600-plus artefacts contain delights not just for the fan but for anyone interested in both the elegance and the endless labour of craft. Attenuated ghouls sketched in his teenage years mature into the spindly stop-frame figure of Jack Skellington from The Nightmare Before Christmas, whose expressions were created using 400 different heads. Michelle Pfeiffer’s Catwoman costume, small enough to be a child’s dressing-up outfit and designed by Mary Vogt and Bob Ringwood, is displayed flat because of its delicacy.
A series of monsters Burton drew in the 1980s appear here as looming sculptures from his 2009 show at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. The Design Museum itself is half-heartedly made into a ‘Burtonesque’ space with a darkened entry vestibule, a soundtrack of scratches and static, and a hall of warped doorways and checkerboard flooring.
Burton was born in 1955 in Burbank – a boring ‘anywhere’ place which forced him to create his own interior worlds. You can see in his work countless debts owed to childhood obsessions with Hammer Horror and Japanese monster movies, the fighting skeletons of Ray Harryhausen and the gruesome illustrations of Gorey and Addams. But he synthesised them into something uniquely his own, and his aesthetic seems fully formed even in his earliest work.
Burton made live action and animated shorts (shown here) as a pre-teen and after graduating from the California Institute of the Arts became a puppeteer on The Muppet Movie and an assistant animator on Disney’s The Fox and the Hound (what were they thinking?).
His shorts Vincent and Frankenweenie led to a feature directing debut on Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure in 1985: Beetlejuice followed three years later. In 2019, Disney trusted Burton – again, not entirely wisely – to reboot one of its most cherished properties, Dumbo.
It becomes clear that Burton is best when working on his own ideas rather than established IP (though his Batman sequel was better than his first stab at the dark knight). And that he remains a generous-hearted kid at heart. Due space is give throughout to Burton’s collaborators, both behind and in front of the camera. It’s altogether creepy, witty and visually ravishing.
Design Museum, to April 21, designmuseum.org
