How Tim Bur­ton found his weird roots in Hansel and Gretel

Tim Burton’s fil­mog­ra­phy is both exten­sive and unique­ly cohe­sive. His images aren’t just dark and twist­ed, they’re dark and twist­ed in the trade­mark Bur­ton way. The char­ac­ters have the same skull-sock­et eyes, the hous­es lean at the same skewed angle. So with that DNA so deep in all his projects, it’s hard imag­in­ing him work­ing to some­one else’s styl­is­tic guide­lines. Which is what hap­pened when, in a pret­ty sweet deal for any ani­ma­tion stu­dent just out of col­lege, he land­ed a job at Dis­ney. Accord­ing to Bur­ton in a Rolling Stone inter­view, ​“I almost went insane.”

There’s a great video of Bur­ton in a small office deep in Disney’s cor­ri­dors, look­ing like he’s hav­ing the most tor­tu­ous work day imag­in­able. It’s not sur­pris­ing for Bur­ton to look like a char­ac­ter out of one of his films, but he doesn’t nor­mal­ly embody so per­fect­ly the zom­bie-like fig­ure trapped in a bewil­der­ing­ly night­mar­ish world. It could be Bur­ton play­ing a par­tic­u­lar­ly belea­guered ver­sion of his him­self for the cam­era. Yet he has also said that he felt stuck in an envi­ron­ment that demand­ed a con­sis­tent­ly cute and whole­some style that was alien to the kind of imag­i­na­tion that had drawn him to ani­ma­tion in the first place.

Unable to cut it with the wood­land ani­mals, Bur­ton was con­signed to work on back­ground design. But there were pro­duc­ers at the stu­dio that saw some­thing in the art he was turn­ing out, and he got the chance to pro­duce an adap­tion of Hansel and Gre­tel that would air on the new­ly launched Dis­ney Chan­nel. The short aired once, on Hal­loween, and unsur­pris­ing­ly wasn’t pre­served as an instant clas­sic of the Dis­ney canon. It was the 2009 MoMA ret­ro­spec­tive of Burton’s work that uncov­ered the film, at a point where his style had not only devel­oped into a pop­u­lar body of work, but also a touch­stone for teen visu­al cul­ture. Jack Skelling­ton had become almost as ubiq­ui­tous as Mick­ey Mouse, and way more relevant.

The film was Burton’s first attempt at live action, though it feels like the actors have been shrunk down to fit in the film’s world, rather than a trans­la­tion of Burton’s style to life-size. Every­thing is spook­i­ly ani­mate, from the eyes that cov­er the house itself to the toys that Bur­ton designed with pro­duc­tion design­er Rick Hein­richs, who would go on to work on many of Burton’s high-pro­file projects. It’s more lo-fi and more art-school than the video game worlds of films like 2005’s Char­lie and The Choco­late Fac­to­ry or 2010’s Alice in Won­der­land, but oth­er­wise it’s unmis­tak­ably Tim Burton.

The only notable devi­a­tion from the Bur­ton for­mu­la is the all-Asian cast. It could have been a weird-for-weird’s‑sake gim­mick, cast­ing Asian-Amer­i­can actors in a folk tale that is nor­mal­ly depict­ed as an Old World Ger­man­ic myth. And it’s not like Burton’s say­ing any­thing rad­i­cal­ly pro­gres­sive about stereo­types here; the final bat­tle is fought out kung-fu style with can­dy cane nunchucks and throw­ing star cook­ies. But it’s an inter­est­ing choice from a direc­tor whose world of semi-nos­tal­gic, semi-grotesque Amer­i­can Goth­ic is almost uni­form­ly white.

It feels more at home in a gallery than the Dis­ney Chan­nel, an exper­i­ment that doesn’t quite hang togeth­er. The visu­al­ly inven­tive pup­pets often steal the scene from the actors, though the per­for­mances almost approach a kind of Noh the­atre in their stylised move­ments. It’s weird but not the care­ful­ly con­trolled weird of his lat­er work. What­ev­er it is, it’s deter­mined­ly anti-Disney.