The Dark Behind Tim Burton's Style

AZKIYA

NUR

SHAFRINA

THE DARK BEHIND

TIM BURTON’S STYLE

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Set design, Gothic elements, and the way he plays with light and shadow are seen in everything from his works. Burton’s visual style is certainly unique, but nonetheless, the director is heavily influenced by some established art movements and cinematic styles. His style is eclectic, and it’s in the combination of different styles, that his style has become uniquely his own.

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Copyright The Dark Behind Tim Burton's Style Oleh Azkiya Nur Shafrina Penata Letak: Azkiya Nur Shafrina Ilustrator: Azkiya Nur Shafrina Penanggung Jawab Proyek Anggi Anggarini, M.Ds Pengarah Komputer Grafis Sulistyono, A.Md A Submission for “Design I Like Project”

By Azkiya Nur Shafrina, DG4A Studio Desain Grafis III Tahun Ajaran 2020/2021 Program Studi Desain Grafis Jurusan Teknik Grafika dan Penerbitan Politeknik Negeri Jakarta Depok, Juli 2021

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THE DARK BEHIND

TIM BURTON’S STYLE

A Z K I YA

N U R

S H A F R I N A 3

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Contents COPYRIGHT ..................................... 2 ACKNOWLADGEMENTS ................ 6 FOREWORD ....................................... 7 CHAPTER 1 ....................................... 9 CHAPTER 2 ...................................... 13 CHAPTER 3 ...................................... 19 CHAPTER 4 ..................................... 25 CREDITS ............................................ 30 BIOGRAPHY ..................................... 32

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Acknowladgements For Allah Swt., the most loving and merciful, who still allows me to live, breathe and work.

Saying Thank you is always is always my favorite part. because it gives me time to think about who my real friends are, and most of all, it makes me realize how lucky I am to be surrounded by wonderful people.

Thank you mom and father who always support and believes in me. never been such a bright kid, but I hope this good moment to finally say, “thank you”.

And my wonderfull siblings, who always really cares for the little sister (me), and my wonderfull friend that I couldn’t mention one by one. My past that taught me all the lessons I have now.

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Foreword The book “The Dark Behind Tim Burton’s Style” is a book that explains the style used by Tim Burton.

The purpose of this book is to fulfill the assignment of a Graphic Design Studio course, as well as to increase knowledge of literature in the world of design.

This book discusses interestingly about the visual style used by Tim Burton, the reasons behind his dark style, the unusual uniqueness of the characters he appears in the film. This book also describes the background, childhood, and career of Tim Burton.

This book is designed in such a way as to be easily understood by the reader and is expected to be useful for both the reader and myself.

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CHAPTER 1

The Beginning

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The Darkest Tim Burton is one of the most recognizable directors. For me, Burton’s combination of different visual styles makes his work very unique, watching a Tim Burton film is like stepping into a macabre fairy tale with a mix of delightfully, deranged characters. His hellish city-scapes, abandoned amusement parks, haunted villages and houses, and creepy circuses are perfect settings for his mix of zany humor and horror.

It’s often dark and disturbing, but I always get a sense Burton is reveling in his grim creations.

While most audiences feared characters like The Wolfman and Frankenstein’s monster, Burton connected with them. He felt empathy for these characters who he viewed as misunderstood and attacked by others for just being different, For Burton, it’s the normal world, like suburbia, that is the true horror in his films.

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Be Original I love what Burton brings to all these ideas is his own joyous idiosyncrasy — learn to defend the original work from the contents of personal heads, actually made a lot of film works. even though it has received scathing criticism and even experienced rejection from many parties, Burton didn’t give up! His work in the film world finally brought him together with great people, such as Stephen King, Johnny Depp, and Vincent Prince, his idol since childhood. However, his courage to be himself made Tim Burton’s works so original that people began to accept him.

His art is truly representative of his vision of the world and he also finds inspiration in the people who surround him. His drawings are often filled with social commentaries. He reveals the absurdity of our consumerist society and its hierarchical organisation. In one drawing he portrays the company Disney as a powerful dehumanizing machine which crushes any sense of singularity.

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CHAPTER 2

Who is Tim Burton’s?

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Background Timothy William Burton as an American writer, producer, director, artist, and animator. Blessed with excellent drawing skills and imaginativeness, Burton converted his hobby into a career and went on to become successful.

Born in 1958 in Burbank, California, American director known for his original, quirky style that frequently drew on elements of the fantastic and the macabre. Grew up with an inverse relationship to his surroundings. Where Burbank was sunny and benign, Burton was moody, interested in the dark and the macabre. When other kids played ball and rode bicycles, he hung out in cemeteries and wax museums.

He developed a love for Hammer horror films and B-movie sci-fi. He seemed to channel these sensibilities into his art, displaying a penchant for exaggerated caricatures and illustrations influenced by a range of pop art from advertising to children’s illustrators to comics.

By age 15, he was winning local advertising art contests, shooting creepy 8mm films around his neighborhood, and creating an illustrated children’s book of his own — which Disney, incidentally, rejected for publication, albeit with an encouraging note. Disney told Burton that “the art is very good. The characters are charming and imaginative, and have sufficient variety to sustain interest.” It would be the start of a long and sometimes contentious relationship with the Mouse.

After high school, Burton attended the prestigious California Institute of the Arts, which opened in 1961, partly out of the last great vision of Walt Disney himself.

Disney died in 1966, but his brother and nephew were both on the school’s founding board of trustees. Disney had imagined an arts school designed specifically to educate new generations of animators, but it wasn’t until 1975 that the school began admitting students into a program to teach character animation.

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Childhood His childhood memories are less than rosy: “When I was younger, I had these two windows in my room, nice windows that looked out onto the lawn, and for some reason my parents walled them up and gave me this little slit-window that I had to climb up on a desk to see out of.

I never did ask them why. “But my parents are dead now, so I guess the answer will remain unanswered as to why they sealed me in a room. I guess they just didn’t want me to escape.”

Like many children who feel their parents don’t understand them, Burton the youngster found solace with his childhood dog: “I like all dogs but, again, dogs are like people or animals are like people. I’m sure if you like cats, I’m sure you’ve had a favourite cat. I’ve had maybe two or three out of a series of pets that you really connect with.

I think it’s the same with people, you never quite know which one you’re going to have that kind of emotional connection with.”

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Career Burton got his start in the industry working as an animator for Walt Disney Studios, where he began to develop his staple brand of quirkiness. Before that, Tim Burton entered the California Institute of Art and worked in animation for Disney but was soon disappointed by the company’s style, which was very different from his own. He was contrived to imitate and create pale imitations of Disney pencil traits with no soul and no emotion. All his independent projects were considered too bizarre to be screened and not adapted for children. It is only after leaving Disney studios that Tim Burton was able to free himself from artistic constrictions and focus on his art which he developed by embracing filmmaking. A film always starts with a drawing. Intuitive, enthusiastic and perfectionist, Tim Burton draws like he breathes. He has never separated his art work from his film work. Johnny Depp recalls his first collaboration with Burton: “All I had the first time I went to work with Tim on

Edward Scissorhands aside from the images arriving in my mind, was a tiny drawing that Tim had made. One look at that drawing was all I needed to understand what Edward was about. It has been exactly the same ever since.” he grew up absorbing a range of pop art styles and cinematic influences that later led to his becoming something of an alienated gothic hero — which still makes itself felt in his work today.

In the early 1980s Tim Burton began working at Walt Disney Studios as an animator. In 1982, Tim Burton as a director released his first official short titled Vincent — which was a sort of autobiographical ode to Edgar Allan Poe and Vincent Price. Vincent is a foundational piece in the world of Tim Burton and one of the best short films of all time. Considering this, let’s review the short film by paying special attention to detail for story conceptualization.

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CHAPTER 3

Style Tim Burton’s World

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The Gothic Is there really any other director that has been compared to the Gothic more than Tim Burton? Not really. Burton’s Gothic style is pervasive, stretching through set, costume, and character. The term Gothic originally applied to architecture, but it filtered down into the fine arts, literature, and cinema. Because cinema is a visual medium, aspects of the Gothic in architecture and art is seen in Burton’s production design, costumes and props, while also borrowing tropes of the Gothic story in literature.

All of which Burton uses, but with a twist. Gothic architecture, which originated in medieval Europe, centered on Gothic cathedrals, which displayed the three characteristics that define Gothic architecture: the pointed arch, the rib vault, and the flying buttress. These visual characteristics seem to describe Burton’s Gotham City. However, Burton gives an overall impression of the Gothic more than actually using its visual conventions. His Gotham City conjures up the overall Gothic effect, through a mishmash of disparate architectural styles ranging from the work of Japanese architect Shin Takamatsu to the New York brownstone. Even Gotham Cathedral is not really Gothic. It’s Barcelona’s Sagrada Familia stretched and reshaped into something of a “broad stroke” Gothic structure, with Hitchcock’s House on the Hill from Psycho tacked on top. This is fine because, like Gothic architecture, Gotham City is meant to induce an overall feeling of awe and dread. This feeling of disquiet, became a central focus of the Gothic, and, as such, translated from the visual arts into literature. Horace Walpole, often viewed as the progenitor of Gothic literature, coined the phrase “Gothic story” with his novel, The Castle of Otranto (1764).

His story established familiar tropes found in almost all stories in the Gothic genre: dark, ominous buildings surround by mist; tragic heroes and antiheroes; and a rapacious interest in the grotesque, weird, and grim proceedings. A century and a half later, these elements found their way into cinema. However, Burton often turns the Gothic on its head. Rather than something to be shunned, and be frightened of (though his films feature that too), characters like Edward Scissorhands and Betelgeuse actually bring a certain charm to the Gothic. Beetlejuice, is a classic haunted house tale, rejigged for comedy, and a modern audience. Burton’s Gothic tendencies continue throughout his work in films like Sleepy Hollow, , Alice in Wonderland, Dumbo and even imagery in his Disney animation films The Nightmare Before Christmas, Frankenstain, and Corpse Bride.

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German Expressionism Anyone familiar with the Arts, can immediately tell Burton’s films are rooted in German Expressionism. What began as a modern art movement in the 1920s, swept through art, cinema, and animation in Europe, and then onto America. The German movement originated during World War 1 and drew on psychoanalysis. A German Expressionist film explores themes of insanity, chaos, death or fear, which is what the German people experienced as a reaction to the war. And they’re suitable themes for any Burton film.

The characteristic of expressionism in Burton Art is very visible from the costumes, we also know that Tim Burton costumes are always showstoppers. Perhaps we should give credit to costume designer Colleen Atwood who’s worked on 12 films with Burton too. Their working relationship has produced some of the best costumes in recent cinema history, such as the costumes of Edward Scissorhands and Sweeney Todd.

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Expressionism explores these themes through the construction of a dreamlike reality through unrealistic set design, lighting, and character.

The primary purpose is to use sets, lighting, and character to show the inner psychology of the characters, and also elicit psychological tension in the viewer.

Contrasting Design There are two sides to Tim Burton’s production design: the naturalistic side and the theatrical side. The naturalistic side tends to mimic Burton’s own exaggerated view of “American suburbia,” as it does here in Edward Scissorhands: The American suburbia aesthetic is defined by bright and bold colours, as well as 1960s architecture and cars. It stands in stark contrast to Burton’s theatrical side, which is defined by gothic overtones and mechanical machinations.

This intersection of culture’s great art, theatre, cinematic movements, and carnival acts concerning the dead and the grotesque resulted in a full spectrum of color that is uniquely Burtons style. Bright colors are not expected in Gothic tales, but the dark, greyscale palette of this world is often juxtaposed against a goofy, almost candy-colored world of pastels, stripes and swirls. The Joker in his purples, greens, and orange is at odds with Anton Furst’s Gotham City, as is the creepy, hilltop Gothic mansion over-looking the pastel-colored suburbia in Edward Scissorhands.

These bright colors can be found in several traditions absorbed into the Burton style visual style including the Day of the Dead and the bright color schemes of the circus and carnivals. The Gothic and gore often take place in bright, sunny, and oversaturated settings. The zany and colorful horror-house factory in Charlie And The Chocolate Factory, or the landscapes of Wonderland in both Alice films, are all examples of this uniquely Burton style trait. In these worlds, colors are often bright, but the deeds are dark.

Both sides of the “Tim Burton design style” are exaggerated — but they’re diametric to each other. I suppose it’s true that contrast is king when highlighting differences between two sets; a point proven by Edward Scissorhands. when thinking about ideas for designing your own sets, consider how Burton uses the naturalistic side in an ironic sense to suggest “this is where the true villainy lives.”

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CHAPTER 4

Tim Burton’s Character Design

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The Use of Lighting Lighting is a vitally important aspect in creating the atmosphere of a scene. Oftentimes, lighting is the difference between a visually enveloping scene and a hard-to-make-out scene.

Specifically, stark shadows and silhouettes, intensify uneasy feelings of dread in German Expressionist cinema. Not only do the sets cast stark shadows, but so do the characters.

The scene where the vampire’s shadow is cast against the wall in the film Nosferatu is an indelible image from German Expressionist cinema, which is often misidentified as Gothic in origin. Burton frequently referenced the image in films like Vincent and in Batman Returns, when The Penguin’s shadow is cast against the sewer wall.

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The Unique We know Tim Burton characters are unique — and not just unique for unique’s sake, they’re an essential aspect of his aesthetic. Tim Burton characters are defined by their exaggerated features; long frizzled hair, baggy eyes, gangly limbs, etc. But the exaggerated features of these characters often serve the role of a smokescreen, hiding their innate human side.

On other side, he shows empathy for many of these characters. Edward Scissorhands, who is an amalgamation of Frankenstein’s monster and Pinocchio, comes to accept his uniqueness over the curse of the film. Other characters, like Betelgeuse, completely accept themselves from the beginning, and take gleeful pride in terrorizing others.

Betelgeuse is not strictly a villain. In fact, he helps to eradicate undesirable tenants from the house in Beetlejuice. Burton, of course, has also crafted great villains with deformities. Burton. might sympathize with the misunderstood monster, but he’s also aware that some of these characters are just plain monsters in every respect. Deformities, in this case, enhance the villain’s infamy. Sometimes, the infliction of a deforming injury represents the character’s complete transformation into a villain.

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The Massage Tim Burton refuses to become a label or a brand and doesn’t categorize his art although others did it for him. His style is very recognizable, full of whirlwinds, stripes, seams, asymmetrical figures, winding staircases, monsters with sad eyes and weird hair. In terms of colours, he often uses black, white, purple, red and sometimes bright colours too. Through his drawings he captures feelings more quickly and efficiently than through words. He bases his style on simplicity, clarity, economy and rapidity. Here is how Ian Mackinnon, puppet creator and designer for Mars Attacks!, has described Burton’s style: ‘The real strength in Tim’s artwork is his appreciation of form with strong shapes and exaggerated proportions.

Within a few seemingly simple pen lines, he creates bold silhouettes. You would be mistaken for thinking that some of Tim’s rough sketches are rudimentary, loose or naïve, for they hold vital information, demonstrate a great delicacy, sensitivity, consistent keen eye, and a stunning vision’.

Tim Burton’s imaginary world has now become a familiar one, a world everyone is drawn to. A world which is welcoming and heart-warming, filled with strange-looking people and sad clowns more frightened than frightening. His message is clear: people are not defined by their appearances. To be different does not mean to be excluded and differences should be cultivated along with singularity and creativity. His universe is more appealing than scary even though it is full of outcast characters. Their tragedy inspires more pity than fear and monsters become charming. He shows life as both kind and tragic, beautiful and cruel, funny and disturbing. The horrible becomes tender and poignant and it is the beautiful that becomes scary.

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Credits What is Burtonesque - A compelete Tim Burton Style Analysis https://www.studiobinder.com/blog/tim-burton-style-analysis/ ‘burtonesque’: the dark and twisted influences behind tim burton’s visual style https://boldentrance.com/burtonesque-the-dark-and-twisted-influences-behind-tim-burtons-visual-style/ The Art of Tim Burton https://www.amazon.com/Art-Tim-Burton-Leah-Gallo/dp/B00HRL19UU The Art of Tim Burton: The Artist Before The Filmmaker https://the-artifice.com/art-tim-burton/ Tim Burton Early Artwork https://blog.ha.com/a-new-tim-burton-art-exhibit-coming-to-las-vegas-stirs-interest-in-early-artwork/ Tim Burton has built his career around an iconic visual aesthetic https://www.vox.com/culture/2019/4/17/18285309/tim-burton-films-visual-style-aesthetic-disney-explained Tim Burton Biography https://www.thefamouspeople.com/profiles/tim-burton-4168.php Rahasia Sukses Seorang Tim Burton https://hai.grid.id/read/07558752/rahasia-sukses-seorang-tim-burton Jack Skellingtone by Tim Burton https://www.invaluable.com/artist/burton-tim-1958-1iklvnpqow/ Mummy Boy by Tim Burton https://the-artifice.com/art-tim-burton/

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Vincent by Tim Burton https://id.pinterest.com/pin/328903579014244677/ Tim Burton Photo https://www.google.com/url?sa=i&url=http%3A%2F%2Fmanutd.ru%2Fredire%2F%3Fgo%3Dstockicons.info%2Fnewest -pages%2Ftim-burton%27s.

The end by Tim Burton https://artoftimburton.tumblr.com/post/28882364241/this-is-my-last-post-and-i-just-wanted-to-say Elsa Van Helsing by Tim Burton https://frontrowfeatures.com/features/film-features/winona-ryder-from-beetlejuice-to-frankenweenie-2335.html Weird Girl by Tim Burton https://disney.fandom.com/wiki/Weird_Girl Sparky by Tim Burton https://id.pinterest.com/pin/509540145310718162/ Edgar E Gore by Tim Burton https://disney.fandom.com/wiki/Edgar_%22E%22_Gore Sparky by Tim Burton https://disney.fandom.com/wiki/Sparky_(Frankenweenie)

html&psig=AOvVaw0VX58kZNZaWhkTWhb0tEHi&ust=1624213726801000&source=images&cd= vfe&ved=0CAsQjhxqFwoTCLiF6OOppPECFQAAAAAdAAAAABAD

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Biography Azkiya Nur Shafrina, Was born in Jakarta, 24rd of May, 1999. who is usually called Kiya, is the last child of the Matori couple with Yayuk. Azkiya has one older sister and two older brothers. She is currently still a graphic design student at State Polytechnic of Jakarta.

Since elementary school, she was presented with many films from her brother who really likes watching movies, including the productions of tim burton, such as frankenweenie, alice in wonderland, corpse bride, charlie and the chocolate factory, 9, and many more, no wonder she was inspired by Burton’s style which looks dark and unique.

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Being unusual in each of his works is his hallmark. The visual style he presents to his audience is very unique. Tim Burton, is a director who is best known for his scary concept and always keeps the “crazy” idea running through his head!. Not infrequently he received harsh criticism and even experienced rejection from various parties.

So, why is his style called different? What are the visual characteristics or conventions that make up Tim Burton’s style? In this book the reader will be taken to explore Tim Burton’s style which opens your mind that being different is a power.