TIM BURTON’S VINCENT
Vincent Price and Tim Burton's Visionary Short
Before Tim Burton made dark, quirky, gothic-tinged movies, he was an animator for Disney. Working on such films as Fox and the Hound (1981) and The Black Cauldron (1985), he was an apprentice animator and art director, although most of what he did at Disney was never on-screen. Although disappointing on the surface, his time at Disney opened many doors for him, most notably the opportunity to write and direct his first movie, Vincent (1982). It’s an animated short about a boy who yearns to live like his hero, the horror actor Vincent Price, the film’s narrator, and a personal hero to Burton. The short proved to be somewhat autobiographical, too and Burton could show us his innermost machinations, his obsession with the dark. Yet, despite its rather gloomy imagery, Vincent is ultimately a tale of being yourself and unabashedly original.
The short itself is dark, with the long shadows recalling German Expressionism. In addition, of course, Vincent showcases the stop-motion style of animating puppets that would later make up the production of Nightmare Before Christmas (1993). Thus, Vincent stands as both a direct and spiritual predecessor of the first stop-motion animated feature-length film. Most importantly, however, when viewing Vincent for the first couple of times, it seems hard to ignore the Quay Brothers’ direct influence on this film. Although they also worked with the stop-motion method, these identical twins create in-depth worlds of surrealist art that move in unnatural ways; the result, for the Brothers Quay, is a specific psychological study in the trenches of the dark mind vocalized not necessarily through language but image. Their most famous film, the short Street of Crocodiles (1986), contrasts the nature of the abstract, the actual idea as it exists in mind with the real-world objects of decay in the form of spoiled meat and dolls’ heads. Vincent creates that same sort of tension between the unspoken world and the reality of our lives.
On the surface, Vincent the boy lives with his sister, dogs, and cats, and he feels the push to express his inner-self. It takes the form of Price’s spooky narration, an out-of-tune solo piano and organ as a soundtrack, and the rolling cadence of the narrator’s rhymed couplets, recalling the Gothic poetry of the 19th Century that Edgar Allan Poe popularized. I’ll spare you the English lit lesson for now. Still, all of these creepy elements contribute to a singular vision. What exists in the mind differs drastically from the image created by the reality of the outside world. Every time there is a line about Vincent the boy, we see him as all the viewers see him; when there is a line about what Vincent would rather be doing, the animation transforms into the hysterical, great, and dark forms of Vincent’s inner-life.
I won’t ruin the short for you by going through each manifestation of Vincent (it’s only six minutes), but I’ll leave you with this: in a sea of bright and empty faces, the ones who are slightly cracked shine the brightest.
