Steven Otfinoski - Tim Burton: Filmmaker

The movie Batman, 1989

Source: Newscom.

When Batman was released in June 1989, Warner Bros. held its breath. But to everyone's relief, the movie was a resounding hit. It earned more than $250 million in the United States and a walloping $400 million worldwide. It was that rare superhero film that was both a commercial and critical success. The extensive merchandising of the film and its characters set a record for Hollywood. At Oscar time the following year, Batman won an Academy Award for Best Art Direction. Perhaps most significantly, Batman, with its dark vision and psychologically complex characters, set a new template for superhero movies, a far cry from the sunnier outlook of the Superman films featuring Christopher Reeve that preceded it. Before Batman, Tm Burton was an up-and-coming director. Now he had entered the big league of Hollywood filmmakers, and his singular vision would startle and enthrall movie audiences for years to come.

Timothy Walter Burton was born on August 25, 1958 in Burbank, California, the first child of William Reed Burton and Jean Roe Erickson. They later had another son, Daniel. Burton's father was a former minor league baseball player whose career ended after an injury. He then went to work for Burbank's Park and Recreation Department. His mother ran a gift shop with a cat theme, called Cats Plus.

"[T]here was a subtext of normalcy," Burton said about his hometown in a quote from the Internet Movie Database, "there's a strong sense of categorization and conformity [] no passion for anything. Just a quiet, kind of floaty, kind of semi-oppressive, blank palette that you're living in."

But at the same time, Burbank, a middle-class suburb of Los Angeles, was one of the epicenters of the film industry. Disney, the country's leading animation studio, was located there. And from an early age, Burton developed a deep love of movies and animation.

A quiet, reclusive child, Burton lived in a world of his imagination. That world was fueled by the fantastical children's books of Dr. Seuss and Roald Dahl. He also devoured the old monster movies from Universal Studios, the sci-fi films of Japan in the '50s and '60s, and the dark horror movies of Italian director Mario Bava. His favorite actor was horror star Vincent Price, who in the early 1960s starred in a string of movies adapted from the supernatural tales of author Edgar Allan Poe.

"This sounds dramatic but he helped me live," Burton said of Price. "by watching [Price's] films, there was a catharsis for me [] I channeled my melodrama into that."

While other children might have found these horror movies terrifying, Burton took solace in them. "[H]e found the realities of everyday lifeparents, teachers, school, breakfastfar more terrifying than monsters or movies," wrote an editor in Interview.

Other children visited playgrounds, while Burton enjoyed hanging out in nearby Valhalla Cemetery. "There was a mystery about it, a juxtaposition of life and death in a place where you really weren't supposed to be," he told Danny Elfman in Interview.

His imagination led him to create his own scary scenarios. "I took a lot of weird-looking debris and crud and just threw it around a wooded area," he told Cal Fussman in Esquire. "I made alien footprints, and I convinced these younger kids that a spacecraft had crashed." Another time he covered his brother in fake blood and gore and pretended to attack him with a knife. An alarmed neighbor phoned the police.

By age 13, Burton's imagination took a more constructive direction, He created his first animated film with a Super 6mm camera, an adaptation of H.G. Wells's famed horror novel The Island of Dr. Moreau. Burton changed the mad doctor's name to Doctor Agor and voiced the role himself. Other roles were played by classmates and friends. When his teacher assigned him a 20-page book report on the famed magician and escape artist Harry Houdini, Burton made a short film about him instead, playing the part of Houdini. He got an A on it.

Tensions with his parents caused Burton to leave home at 14 and move in with his grandmother who lived nearby. At 16, he had his own apartment above a garage she owned. While in high school, he earned money to pay his rent by bussing tables at a restaurant.

Burton remained an outsider at Burbank High School, although he played on the water polo team. An average student at best, he put most of his energies outside of school into painting and drawing. His art skills gained him a modicum of fame in his freshman year when he entered a contest for an anti-litter poster, sponsored by a local refuse collection company. Burton's poster won, and for the next year it appeared on all the company's garbage trucks.

Upon graduation, Burton received a scholarship from the Disney Studios to attend the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia. There he studied character animation and often found himself at odds with the traditional drawing the institute taught. In danger of losing his scholarship, Burton thought making an animated film might keep him in school. Stalk of the Celery Monster was a kind of sequel to his earlier Island of Dr. Agor. It caused a sensation with his fellow students, including John Lasseter, who would later direct animated films for Pixar. The film came to the attention of Disney Studios and, impressed by his talent, they offered Burton a job in their animation division as an animator's apprentice upon graduation. Burton believed that all his dreams had come true. But his experience with the world's most famous animation company wouldn't work out quite the way he expected.