“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.
