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    Direct Conversations: The Animated Films of Tim Burton (Foreword by Tim Burton)
    Direct Conversations: The Animated Films of Tim Burton (Foreword by Tim Burton)
    Direct Conversations: The Animated Films of Tim Burton (Foreword by Tim Burton)
    Ebook55 pages39 minutes

    Direct Conversations: The Animated Films of Tim Burton (Foreword by Tim Burton)

    By Tim Lammers and Tim Burton

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    About this ebook

    Throughout his career, movie journalist Tim Lammers has talked with director Tim Burton and the key players who helped bring the stop-motion films The Nightmare Before Christmas, Corpse Bride, and Frankenweenie to life.

    Now for the first time, Lammers has assembled the stories from Burton and his band of creatives all in one place. In Direct Conversations: The Animated Films of Tim Burton, you will not only hear from Burton, but Danny Elfman, Chris Sarandon, Allison Abbate, Martin Landau, Elijah Wood, Atticus Shaffer, Helena Bonham Carter, Alan Rickman, the late Ray Harryhausen, and more. The release of Direct Conversations: The Animated Films of Tim Burton comes as the 1993 classic The Nightmare Before Christmas celebrates its 20th anniversary.

    Direct Conversations: The Animated Films of Tim Burton also includes a foreword by Tim Burton.

    48 pages
    LanguageEnglish
    PublishereBookIt.com
    Release dateApr 26, 2016
    ISBN9781456620844
    Direct Conversations: The Animated Films of Tim Burton (Foreword by Tim Burton)

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      Book preview

      Direct Conversations - Tim Lammers

      Laine

      Foreword

      I started my career in cell animation and have since utilized both stop-motion and computer animation.  I appreciate all forms—each has its advantages.  I have a special place in my heart, however, for stop-motion.  There's something about the dimension, texture and physical armatures that I've always loved.  It's a visceral, tangible experience.  It's a field that often gets overlooked and that I hope will continue to exist.  I'm happy that a respected journalist like Tim Lammers is an advocate of the medium.  It will be people like him, as much as directors and filmmakers, who will help keep the art form alive.

      —Tim Burton

      London, November 2013

      Chapter One: The Girl with Blue Hair

      The time was February 2006, when after various inquiries over the years, I finally landed an interview with Tim Burton. While not completely press shy, the filmmaker—easily one of most influential artists of our times—is hard to pin down, unless you can catch him somewhere in the press gauntlet before his films are released. Even when he's nominated for an Oscar, like he was for directing two of his stop-motion films, the opportunities are few.

      But this time around, thanks to a dear friend of mine at Warner Bros., the time had come. Burton was doing a few press calls to talk about Corpse Bride—technically his first turn as a director of a stop-motion feature, even though his influences were all over the Henry Selick-helmed The Nightmare Before Christmas thirteen years earlier. A beautifully staged Gothic romantic tale co-directed by Burton and filmmaker Mike Johnson, Corpse Bride was up for a Best Animated Feature Oscar.

      The wonderful thing I immediately sensed while talking with Burton was that he wasn't feigning any modesty. He never once said it's just an honor to be nominated, nor was he serving up any thoughtless sound bites to pass the time. That's because Corpse Bride, like all of Burton's films, clearly has deep meaning to him. Making the film wasn't about being nominated or winning awards but putting forth the possibility that it would somehow resonate with viewers on an emotional level.

      For me, the impact of Corpse Bride had everything to do with my then ten-year-old daughter, Cleo, who was sparked with an idea as our family screened the film in September 2005. Cleo was so taken by the beauty of the Corpse Bride that she made a commitment to dress up as the doomed lady-in-waiting for Halloween 2006 (she’d already settled on a costume for the following month).

      So, thrilled knowing what the film meant to my daughter, the word of her plans was how I kicked off my first conversation with Tim Burton.

      See, that's amazing to me. I love hearing those kinds of stories because they are coming from people's hearts instead of some other place, Burton told me with a humble sense of appreciation, before adding with a laugh, As long as she doesn't get permanent blue hair she'll be okay.

      Apart from the satisfaction of knowing the impact his work had on viewers, Burton said if he felt anything about the Oscar nomination it was a validation of sorts that the teetering art of stop-motion animation would live to see another day. He hoped—just hoped—that the nomination and the recognition it brought to stop-motion would inspire more artists to get into the field instead of taking the route into the ever-burgeoning field of computer animation.

      "That's why it took so long between Nightmare and this film—finding the right group of people and getting the right group of animators together," Burton recalled of the thirteen-year stretch between the production of Nightmare and Corpse Bride. "A lot of the people who did stop-motion went off into the computer field. They're getting more and more rare,

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