Tim Burton

Tim Burton

Fill in the gaps in this biography of Tim Burton

Tim Burton was  born in 1958, in the city of Burbank,California.

He remains without question one of the most original film makers working in the movie industry today.

Indeed, his talent and originality have kept him at the top of the profession where he occupies a very special place, somewhere between the mainstream and the avant-garde, in that region of cinema occupied by artists ______ worldview is _______ unconventional that it attains popular appeal.

In 1989, Tim Burton directed the hugely known Batman which, although his less personal film, was one of the most famous movies of all time and gave him unprecedented succes in Hollywood, considering the originality and adventurousness of his earlier films (for example Beetlejuice in 1988).

Edward Scissorhands (1990), another hit, saw him at the peak of his directing powers and established a fruitful working in partenership with actor Johnny Depp who played in his 2005 film version of Roald Dahl’s book Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and who became one of his most esteemed parteners since their first film together.

In 1992, Batman Returns was a much darker film than the original, a reflection of how much cinematographic freedom Tim Burton had won (it is said that Warner Bros were reputedly unhappy with the final result).

And even in his film Ed Wood (1994), his loving tribute to the life and work of the legendary ‘Worst Director of All Time’ Edward D. Wood, Jr., was a box-office disaster, it got some of the best critics of Burton’s career.

In fact, Tim Burton is famous  both for his dark, quirky-themed movies like Sleepy Hollow, Corpse Bride, Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, or Dark Shadows (2012) and for blockbusters such as Pee-Wee's Big Adventure, Batman, Planet of the Apes, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and Alice in Wonderland (2010), one of his most  famous films, which became the fifth highest-grossing film of all time.

Burton has directed 18 feature films as of 2014, and has produced 12 as of 2012  (among which the very nice Chrismas tale called The  Nightmare Before Chrismas in 1993).

All in all, Tim Burton’s films consistently challenge the spectator’s mind, push forward the industry of filmmaking and bring to life previously unthinkable characters/ movies (like Edward Scissorhands).

Taken as a whole, his work resides on the confrontation between the fantastic and the thriller, and the consequences of these two worlds intermingling.

Big Fish, Burton’s 2003 effort, is no different. And meanwhile , somehow, it is not really the

same.

On the surface, it would appear to have all the aspects of a classic Burton film: a magic screenplay, fairy-tale characters, flights of imagination, forces of nature (as well as the supernatural), far-fetched situations and vastly imaginative visual style and imagery. The movie is, in fact, entirely packed with fanciful episodes that it begins to feel like a loose adaptation of The Odyssey, told from the mouth of an aging character named Ed Bloom, a story-teller and dreamer who sees the world with beautiful eyes.