“I’ve taken numerous solace in my characters,” the film-maker Tim Burton writes in Designing Worlds: “the sensation of every thing being fairly odd and unusual once you’re coming to phrases with life as a baby.” Drawing on Burton’s private archive, the e-book traces how he has introduced an outsized gothic sensibility to modern cinema and artwork, utilizing a definite visible language that blends melancholy, horror, fantasy and macabre mythology, knowledgeable by gothic literature, Modernist and Futurist artwork, traditional horror, German Expressionist cinema and pulp sci-fi.
Maria McLintock, the editor of the lavishly illustrated Designing Worlds and curator of the corresponding exhibition on the Design Museum, London (till 21 April 2025), goes past the early movies for which Burton is greatest identified—Beetlejuice (1988), Batman (1989) and Edward Scissorhands (1990)—to point out Burton’s vary as illustrator, painter, photographer and creator, whereas inserting his curiosity within the gothic in a social-political context.
Burton was born in 1958 within the quietly prosperous Los Angeles County suburb of Burbank (within the shadow of the Hollywood signal) and was raised in a white-picket-fence household that conformed to the American Dream; his father was a retired minor league baseball participant who labored as a senior civil servant, his mom ran a cat-themed present store. Followers of Edward Scissorhands and Beetlejuice will recognise the conformist middle-class milieu, one from which Burton’s most memorable protagonists battle to flee.
Teenage expertise
The teenage Tim confirmed expertise: profitable an anti-littering poster competitors and spending hours alone in his bed room or the yard, making crude animations. His first credited movie, The Island of Physician Agor (1971), tailored from an H.G. Wells novel, featured footage of caged creatures shot surreptitiously in Los Angeles’s zoo. In an interview with McLintock, Burton recounts how artwork grew to become for him a self-imposed remedy: “Rising up, I used to be very a lot an introvert: I didn’t really feel very communicative, so drawing grew to become my technique of expressing ideas and emotions I struggled to articulate verbally.”
Whereas on the California Institute of the Arts he developed an curiosity in illustration and stop-motion animation, earlier than working for Disney—he submitted an illustrated kids’s e-book in lieu of a CV, pages of that are joyously reproduced in Designing Worlds. However Burton was not an organization man. The animation duties assigned to him didn’t marry together with his personal subversive imaginative and prescient, on which he was unwilling to compromise, and his superiors reassigned him to work on The Black Cauldron (1985), a fantasy journey movie set within the Early Center Ages and based mostly on Welsh mythology. Burton’s illustrations didn’t make the ultimate lower.
Designing Worlds focuses on the ingenuity of the set design and complicated storyboarding of the early movies, an imperfect however creatively audacious and impressionistic method to world-making, that has influenced many artists working in his wake. In Beetlejuice, Burton created a world that oscillated between mundane suburban settings and a chaotic afterlife constructed on warped shapes, nauseating colors and exaggerated constructions. Created on a tiny price range, and seemingly held along with sticking tape, the world of Beetlejuice builds on the legacy of foundational Hollywood fantasy movies resembling The Wizard of Oz, during which actuality and the supernatural coexist uneasily, whereas embodying what Burton calls his “gothic surrealism”. In Edward Scissorhands, Burton’s set design likewise juxtaposes the sterile, pastel-coloured suburban world with the gothic, decaying mansion the place Edward lives.
Burton’s latter profession has included some notable turkeys: Alice in Wonderland (2010) shot in short-lived 3D, is extensively considered one of many ugliest motion pictures ever made. Burton works greatest when the seams are sagging and visual, and the set may collapse at any second. The sheen of computer-generated imagery has by no means suited him. Designing Worlds may need been extra prepared to have interaction critically with this bloated later interval.
However Burton’s affect is obvious, extending far past movie. A spread of creatives—from rock stars to kids’s illustrators to vogue designers like Hedi Slimane and Issey Miyake—have drawn on Burton’s aesthetics, incorporating his sensibilities and utilizing his characters and themes as direct inspiration. Designing Worlds pays homage to the best way Burton’s work has reshaped cultural perceptions of darkness, melancholy and loss of life, whereas championing the gothic not as a relic of the Victorian period, however as a residing, respiratory aesthetic that informs and engages with modern societal issues.
• Maria McLintock (ed.), Tim Burton: Designing Worlds, Design Museum Publishing, 272pp, color illustrations all through, £29.95 (on the Design Museum exhibition)/£34.95 (pb), printed 14 November
• Tom Seymour is a contract author and the previous museums editor of The Artwork Newspaper
