LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Tim Burton: Roy Disney
built 646 days ago
Starting his career as an animator for Disney, Tim Burton made his feature film directorial debut with the visually dazzling, low-budget Pee-Wee's Big Adventure. When it became a surprise blockbuster, studios began to trust him with larger budgets and the whims of his expansive imagination. Mixing gothic horror, black comedy, and oddball whimsy, Burton's movies veer from childlike enchantment to morbid melancholy, often with the same frame.
Source:
While his parents wanted him to go play outside and be "normal," Tim Burton preferred to soak into a 1950's horror movie, or withdraw into his own mind. Aside from watching horror movies, the Burbank-born Burton ... spent much of his adolescence drawing, and after graduating from high school, he took a job as an animator at Walt Disney Studios.
Source:
Drawing inspiration from Vincent Price movies, German expressionism and Gothic horror movies from the 1930s, Burton went to work for the Mouse House as an apprentice animator, though he ultimately proved to be ill-equipped to do things the Disney way. After working as an animator on “The Fox and the Hen†(1981), Burton was given $60,000 by Disney to create anything he wished, which he used to make the six-minute animated short, "Vincent" (1982), a wryly amusing film portraying the dual life of a tortured, but seemingly normal suburban child who lives in a fantasy world of Gothic horror while imagining that he is Vincent Price (who incidentally served as narrator). The autobiographical character was a prototype for the misunderstood, sympathetic outsider at the center of most of Burton’s subsequent films. He followed up with the partially live-action "Frankenweenie" (1984), an inventive twist on the "Frankenstein" story that depicted a young boy who brings his dog back to life by jump-starting him with a car battery. Considered too outré for a Disney product, the short failed to receive a proper release until 1992 when it finally became available on video and on The Disney Channel.
Source:
Burton graduated from California Institute of the Arts, and started his career at Disney, working on The Fox and the Hound and The Black Cauldron. He found the work boring, but Disney's department chiefs let Burton goof around on his own personal projects, resulting in the short subjects Vincent (a tribute to Vincent Price) and Frankenweenie. Burton's shorts weren't released until after his later successes, but Paul Reubens came across them, and he was impressed. Burton was picked to bring Reubens' "Pee-wee Herman" character to the big screen, and the success of Pee-wee's Big Adventure got Burton a green light to make Beetlejuice.
Source:
Before long young Burton was making horror films with a Super 8 camera, but he felt more like an artist than a filmmaker. He began drawing at an early age, but, it wasn't until he has spent some time at California Institute of the Arts, that he was given an opportunity that would change his life. Disney, after seeing Burton's artwork, hired him immediately. Amazingly, they didn't even have a job that specifically fit what he could do. He was hired on the basis that if Disney didn't hire him, someone else would.
Source:
In 1982, Burton made his first short, Vincent, a six-minute stop-motion film about a young boy who fantasizes that he is his (and Burton's) screen idol Vincent Price, with Price himself providing narration. This was followed by the live-action short Frankenweenie, starring Barret Oliver, Daniel Stern and Shelley Duvall (an early supporter of Burton's work). Shot in black and white and inspired by James Whale's Frankenstein, Frankenweenie features a boy who reanimates his dog Sparky who was hit by a car. Although the film won praise at film festivals, Disney was concerned that the film was too scary for children and, not knowing what to do with it, shelved the film. (Frankenweenie later received a video release in 1992).
Source:
MORE ABOUT
Roy Disney