Tim Burton turns 64 | Discover the BEST and WORST films directed by the iconic filmmaker

One of the strong icons of Hollywood cinema of the 80s and 90s, the director Tim Burton completes today August 25 64 winters in black and white. The seasoned filmmaker began his career as an animation technician for major studios like Disney. With an exotic taste, Burton has always had a passion for old black and white films, horror and monster cinema and the technique of stop-motion animation. This particular taste was put into practice when he had the chance to make his first short films, shortly after transporting him to successful feature films. It is precisely for this reason that at the beginning of his career, Tim Burton drew attention to the Gothic style in the architecture of his sets, his artistic direction, his costumes and the make-up of his characters and his films. .

All of this made him the ideal candidate to lead production at Warner Bros. which brought the comics of one of pop culture’s most beloved characters, the dark Batman, to the big screen. Well, arguably it was Burton and his visual style that brought Batman back into the shadows – so many of his iterations at the time (comics, cartoons, and even the “Soc, Pow, Bam” sitcom) were quite colorful. Burton decided to return to the sources of the character, in a film with a monochromatic tone and an extremely melancholy atmosphere. Batman (1989) was a great success and a real fever. For the second film, Burton was given carte blanche by the studio to do whatever he wanted, shortly after the same executives decided he had gone too far with Batman Returns (1992).

This initial style of Tim Burton, which made his name, has perhaps been lost in his later works – all very colorful and full of special computer effects, which take away part of his so-called visual identity. This has resulted in works that audiences may not even recognize as the director’s. All is not lost for Burton, however, as later this year he will release his first series on Netflix – and one that has everything to do with old-school Burton: Wednesday, the Wandinha-centric Addams Family series. We can’t wait for the show, but until it premieres, we’ll continue to honor the director and showcase his best and worst films (only the ones he directed) according to critics and the General public. Check.

Many people may even confuse and think that the cult classic The Strange World of Jack (1993) is a film directed by Tim Burton, since the filmmaker’s name is used to sell the stop-motion animation. But Jack and James and the Giant Peach (1996) are Burton-exclusive films, directed by collaborator Henry Selick. Of course, in the 1993 film, Burton also created the story and the characters, but the first animated feature film he directed was this Corpse Bride. And it starts with both right feet. The story is so impactful that it manages to transcend being “a kid’s movie”, without needing a remake with real actors to ever come out.

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04 | Sweeney Todd: The Barber Demon of Fleet Street (2007)

The first and only musical of Tim Burton’s career, Sweeney Todd was the director’s return to the darker climate of his early career. Based on a famous musical, the story is all about Burton and looks like it was created for the filmmaker to actually go to the movies. In the plot, Johnny Depp plays a London barber wrongfully imprisoned after getting in the way of powerful corrupt people. After serving his sentence, he concludes a macabre pact with a pastry chef to whom he rents a room. So, the guy starts using his barbershop to do bloody justice, while his accomplice cooks unusual pies, which are starting to have a lot of success.

This list is based on the opinion of critics and the general public. If it was only the opinion of this friend who tells you, Batman – The Return (1992) would probably enter this top 5 of the best Tim Burton films. But since neither I nor anyone from CinePOP had to say in formulating the two top 5s, Beetlejuice ended up taking home the bronze medal for Best Director’s Feature Film. Nothing to say, we loved the movie. I don’t know if it would necessarily enter my personal ranking. But it is also far from appearing in the ranking of the worst. Here, in this second film by Tim Burton for the cinema, and first “author”, the filmmaker decides to get involved in a ghost story in a haunted mansion. Oh yes, it’s a comedy. It’s also one of the most beloved films of the 80s. Burton has been trying for a long time to get a sequel to the role.

Winning the silver medal is Tim Burton’s version of the classic Frankenstein. Like Mary Shelley’s morbid tale, the director creates his own story about an artificially born man, assembled by an inventor, who ultimately fails to teach him about life and its social dynamics. Edward is a hugely cult film in part because of its strong romantic streak, which chronicles a forbidden love between an angelic teenager (Winona Ryder) and a kind, lovable monster (Johnny Depp) with scissors for his hands. This is perhaps Tim Burton’s first film to mix different feelings and emotions, being in some ways a more human work than his comedies and action films that came before it.

With the gold medal goes Ed Wood, and on that the general public, the critics and I all agree. Maybe if it was up to me to create a list of the top 5 Tim Burton movies, I would change some positions, leave some that have appeared here, and include some not mentioned. However, one thing we agree on is top 5 position, it has to be Ed Wood. There’s no way, this really is Tim Burton’s best movie. This is because it works in different areas. First, it’s the filmmaker’s most serious and mature film, one that lacks fantastical elements and one that kids who generally enjoy his movies wouldn’t identify with as much. Second, don’t forget Burton’s quirks, even though it’s a more adult film, everything is still created in black and white, depicting a “weird world”. And thirdly, it works as a great tribute to the seventh art and the passion for cinema, with the biography of the subject considered the worst director of all time. Burton’s face.

05 | Martian attacks! (1996)

We started the list of Tim Burton lows with the movie he directed after what is considered the best movie of his career, the item above. Here I will paraphrase the great critic Roger Ebert when he gave his verdict on Mars Attacks! – “Tim Burton made a movie about Ed Wood, and with his next job he seems to want to become Ed Wood”. After all, the “worst director of all time” became famous for his totally B alien movie. Tim Burton also directed his own, but using several million dollars in the budget. Kind of like a comic version of Independence Day because they came out the same year, Mars Attacks! it’s actually based on a series of action figures from the 1960s, hence its lack of substance. It’s a cult guilty pleasure.

We can even say that Tim Burton’s Alice is a film aimed at very young children, but it must be taken into account that this does not justify the lack of quality of some children’s films, after all we have excellent representatives of the genre – like ET (1982), for example. In other words, a children’s movie does not automatically mean a bad adult movie. And Alice, despite being one of the biggest financial successes of the director’s filmography, simply lacks imagination, good characters (aside from Helena Bonham Carter’s Mad Queen) and ends up feeling like Burton didn’t have much space to make the film his own. work – maybe Disney has restricted it too much. If we didn’t know it was your movie, we would never tell. Now think how nice it would be to really see an Alice in Wonderland in the hands of Tim Burton’s root – that is, a weird and slightly disturbing movie.

03 | Dumbo (2019)

Exactly everything that was said about Alice in Wonderland in the article above can be said about this Dumbo, a new live-action version of a famous animation from the same Disney. The feeling with these films is that Tim Burton has been extremely pruned, unable to let his true essence flow. Nine years after the severe criticism suffered by Alice, Tim Burton finds himself again without autonomy and in this period he has done nothing really significant. It’s as if he had just become a director for hire, obeying the orders and whims of producers and studio executives to deliver the movie they wanted and not what Burton wanted. The result: a film anyone could have made, without any sense of the Burton imprint of yesteryear. Again, it would have been great to see Dumbo get the root treatment from Tim Burton, in a dark, melancholy, and beyond mad film with ominous doses – but still with big heart and enchantment.

As much as Mars Attacks! didn’t work out as expected, we can still feel Tim Burton’s hands and quirks in every frame. This is where things started to go off the rails in the director’s career. When Tim Burton was named director of the Planet of the Apes remake for Fox, fans went wild, imagining it would be a movie in the style of his Batman, Edward Scissorhands and Ed Wood even more than his previous work. Legend of the Headless Horseman (1999), a gothic horror tale that has Burton’s face and soul. What we got, however, was an action movie that anyone could have made. We immediately realized it wouldn’t be much like Tim Burton’s Planet of the Apes when makeup artist Rick Baker said he would only do the movie if the apes were realistic and not “Tim Burton’s apes Burton”, i.e. surrealists. And then the problems of lack of identity began…

Three of the four items above are films that don’t have the “Tim Burton face”. The director’s films are not only recognizable by the look (which includes art direction, costumes and make-up), although this is one of the major elements. There is also a very particular climate with which the filmmaker likes to work. Essentially, Burton puts a melancholic tenor into his narrative. What happens is that this climate ends up marrying perfectly with the proposed look. Maybe Burton brightened up his days and decided that life is now good and daytime. That’s not really the problem with the above items. After all, a film can “not look like Tim Burton” and still be good, like Big Fish (one of the best in his repertoire). As well as others can be totally your face and not very good. This is the case with Dark Shadows, Tim Burton’s worst “Tim Burton movie”. For years, star Johnny Depp had his sights set on taking his favorite soap opera from the small screen and bringing it to the big screen. Next to Burton, what was supposed to be a worthy rival to The Addams Family was in debt in terms of a lighter script and also more (much more) substantial.

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