New eBook: "The Animated Films of Tim Burton"

A new eBook has been published, Direct Conversations: The Animated Films of Tim Burton. Written by Tim Lammers, the 48-page book comes with a foreword by Tim Burton.

Description: 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 examines such films as The Nightmare Before Christmas, Corpse Bride, 9, and Frankenweenie. Physical copies are unavailable, but you can purchase the eBook for $4.99 USD.

Interview: "Frankenweenie" Animation Director Mark Waring

We Are Movie Geeks recently interviewed Frankenweenie animation director Mark Waring. Waring discussed how the stop-motion animation process on Frankenweenie was unique, what the crew was like, Tim Burton's influences, and more:

We Are Movie Geeks: Congratulations on FRANKENWEENIE. I took my daughters to see it and we loved it.

Mark Waring: Oh good, thanks.

WAMG: Did you grow up a fan of stop-motion animation?

MW: I was always interested on those things. Whenever there was something with stop-motion on TV I would always watch it, but it was never something that I thought I would end up doing. I was always interested in art and design and films as well but it wasn’t until I was in college that I was introduced to animation through a course. It was then I realized that this was what I wanted to do. It was design, art, sculpting, film, all combined and it was something I could do for a living. Then I started studying the history of animation and thought this was really wanted I wanted to do.

WAMG: I saw where you had recently participated in a panel discussion on Ray Harryhausen.

MW: Yeah, I’ve done a couple of those. Tony Dawson, who’s written four or five books on Harryhausen, runs the Ray Harryhausen Foundation, invited me to do that. Ray has never thrown anything away. He’s kept everything he’s created throughout his whole life right down to models he made when he was twelve. There’s a whole history and archive there and Tony is helping him look after that. He’s got me involved in various talks and panel discussions. Harryhausen has been such an influence and has helped me so much in my art. He was a pioneer and his techniques are still relevant. We still reference his monster characters. The animators all get together and look at his films and study what he did and how he worked.

WAMG: What are the key differences between what Harryhausen was doing decades ago and what you are doing with a project like FRANKENWEENIE?

MW: Technically it’s exactly the same. It’s basically down to, as an animator, you’re standing in front of a puppet that got an armature inside and you’ve got to bring it to life. Turn it into something that’s moving in a believable, if not necessarily realistic, way. You have to give it emotion, which I think is what Ray Harryhausen did best. He made them angry, or frightened, or whatever they were and we’ve got to do the same thing. We’ve obviously got more technology around us now.

WAMG: And more people. Harryhausen pretty much did everything on his own.

MW: Absolutely. He did all of that on his own. He made the puppets. His dad helped make the armatures. His mom helped make the costumes, but he shot it and did virtually everything on his own. With the technology we have now, we can check our work, which he couldn’t do. We can walk away, have a cup of tea, look at it, and come back and fix anything. He had none of that, he worked blind. He had no references whatsoever. Sometimes what we do is have our animators work blind like Harryhausen did, just for practice, to kind of get into the swing of it. It’s tricky. Harryhausen developed these metal pointers that he could measure exactly how far he moved, or would need to move, say one of the Hydra’s seven heads. We still use that tool today, in spite of all the technology at our disposal.

WAMG: Did you grow up a fan of monster movies?

MW: Sort of, yeah. If anything like that came on the TV, I would watch it. I don’t know if it’s a cultural thing but over here, in the UK, those sort of things weren’t really shown on TV like they were in America, but it was definitely something I was interested in.

WAMG: I noticed in FRANKENWEENIE Victor’s parents are at one point watching HORROR OF DRACULA with Christopher Lee on their TV. Who’s idea was that?

MW: Oh, I’m sure that was Tim Burton’s choice. After all, FRANKENWEENIE is Tim Burton’s childhood. Victor and Sparky are Tim and his dog. That’s what he based everything on, the whole idea of a boy and his dog and what that meant to him, he just packs FRANKENWEENIE with his world and I suppose HORROR OF DRACULA is just a film Tim remembers fondly from his childhood and that’s why he chose to include it.

WAMG: Did Tim Burton give you much creative leeway with FRANKENWEENIE, or was it strictly storyboarded?

MW: He was involved a lot, especially in the early development stages. All of the character designs come straight out of his sketchbooks. We’d worked together in the past and all of the inspiration comes through him. I think the storyboarding style as well. The early stages of the process set the tone and the film shows that. There’s very little in the film that doesn’t have his fingerprints all over it. That said, he’s very open to suggestions. He likes to surround himself with people who know him so a lot of the crew from THE CORPSE BRIDE also worked on FRANKENWEENIE.

WAMG: How many animators worked on FRANKENWEENIE?

MW: I guess around thirty. There are different levels of animators. We have four or five lead animators, then fifteen or so who are crafting every day doing their work. After that there’s a team of assistants who animate as well. Some are good at intimate character work, some are broader at animating the broader action scenes. So we mix and match and steer people towards their strengths.

WAMG: I remember when Tim Burton made MARS ATTACKS fifteen years ago and wanted to use stop motion, but decided he could make CGI look more like what he had in mind. Why do you think he went back to old school stop motion for CORPSE BRIDE and FRANKENWEENIE?

MW: I think partly stop motion is a physical thing, it’s a tactile thing. You can see the work that’s gone into it. I would have loved for MARS ATTACKS to have been stop motion. When I first heard about the film I thought it would be the perfect homage to ’50s sci-fi and B movies and flying saucers and all those things. It would have been perfect if they’d gone down that route. They had originally wanted to do it as stop motion. They had brought some puppet people in and had made armatures and I think it was quite last minute that they actually pulled the plug and went with CGI. They may have been worried about the time it was going to take with deadlines or whatever and I think if they would have gone that way, it would have been fantastic. There’s a magic to the art of stop motion that CGI just doesn’t have. It doesn’t mean that CGI is wrong or that one style is better than the other, I just think with stop motion you better see the craft on display.

WAMG: Had you seen the FRANKENWEENIE from the ’80s before you got involved with this project?

MW: Oh yes, we used that film as a reference for so many of the shots, but obviously the story has been fleshed out much more. I think it had its own mood and momentum but the feel of that short is what we were going for.

WAMG: There’s a short on the Blu-ray release of FRANKENWEENIE titled ‘Sparky vs the Flying Saucer’. What can you tell me about that?

MW: Well, I directed it and it was great to have the opportunity to do that. In the film itself, Victor is showing making a little film, a home movie with Sparky acting as a giant monster and the idea behind ‘Sparky vs the Flying Saucers’ is that this is another film that Victor has made with Sparky, and perhaps he has made a whole series of these films that he can show to his parents. This one is a Mars Attacks type of thing really with space aliens and Sparky in a space suit and all.

WAMG: Was this Tim Burton’s story?

MW: It was from Tim’s idea but the actual script itself was by Derek [Frey] who is Tim’s assistant and he and I discussed the idea and we fleshed it out with the storyboarders and made this little film. We made it towards the end of the shoot and thought about maybe tagging it on to the end of the film but it’s now on the DVD.

WAMG: Do you see possibly making some more Sparky shorts?

MW: I’d love to. I love the concept that there could be more of these films featuring Sparky hidden away in Victor’s attic. Who knows? I think we created a lovely world. Maybe we could make more shorts, perhaps a cowboy film or any classic film genres.

WAMG: What’s next for Mark Waring?

MW: I would love to work on more features. I’d love to work with Tim again. I love the stop motion format. In the meantime though I’m working on commercials in London and keeping busy.

WAMG: Good luck with your future projects and thanks for talking to We Are Movie Geeks.

MW: Thank you.

Burton Talks "Frankenweenie," Childhood, Disney

Entertainment Weekly spoke with Tim Burton recently. Even after releasing Dark Shadows, the filmmaker has plenty on his plate for 2012, including another feature that he has directed, Frankenweenie. In the interview, Burton discussed returning to this personal source material, why he is adapting his original live-action short into animation, his childhood and how that has informed the new film, and working again with Disney:

ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: What is it about stop-motion animation that appeals so much to you?

TIM BURTON: It goes back to Ray Harryhausen. You look at his stuff, and you see the fur move! As a child, I recognized this artist. And there was something about stop-motion that felt more like a personal medium, especially because there were so few people doing it. Also, you go back to those kinds of stories, like Frankenstein or Pinocchio, about bringing an inanimate object to life. So here you have a process that does just that! It takes an inanimate object and you bring it to life. As hard of a medium as it is, there’s something so beautiful about that and the fact that it goes back to the beginning of film. The technique hasn’t changed — it’s still animating one frame at a time for 24 frames [to create a single second of film].

Is there anything that stop-motion allowed you to do this time around that you couldn’t have done back in 1984?

Actually, no. On Corpse Bride, our puppets were so sophisticated that people thought they were [animated] in the computer. It sort of undermined the beauty of the stop-motion technique. So, with Frankenweenie, we have a smaller budget and decided that the puppets are going to have to be a bit cruder. But that’s okay, because that’s part of the charm of stop-motion. I wouldn’t go back to the original King Kong and smooth down the fur.

But what has stop-motion allowed you to do with Frankenweenie that you couldn’t have done in live-action?

With my background in animation, I wanted to make the characters look more like my original drawings. There’s just more of a weird kind of energy in those drawings, and there are certain acting things that you can’t do with a real dog, you know? We wanted real dog emotions, and it’s a little easier to try to get that in animation.

In the original, you had the young actor Barret Oliver and all these normal-looking kids. But in this animated Frankenweenie, I was happy to see that many of the kids now look a little… off.

Well, I remember the school politics, and not only how weird you felt as a kid, but how weird everybody else was, too. It was easy to link those memories to old horror movies. I mean, there was a kid back in school that would remind me of Boris Karloff. And there was a weird girl.

Even though he brings a dog back to life, your main character, Victor, seems like the most normal kid around.

That’s how I felt as a kid. I felt very weird, isolated, and lonely, but at the same time I didn’t feel that way as a person. I didn’t feel like a weirdo. So you’re kind of in between a rock and a hard place — you’re treated one way, and yet you don’t really feel that way at all.

How much of Victor is a representation of your childhood? There’s a scene in the movie in which Victor’s dad encourages him to play baseball, and I know your dad was a minor-league player.

My dad was a sports guy, but he was never like one of those Great Santini dads where you either play sports or you’re going to go to hell and burn. I played sports, but I also liked making my little super-8 films, and I liked experimenting. I tried to capture that with Victor. He’s part of the quiet loner category. We weren’t overly demonstrative; we were just kind of like the quiet rebels.

When you finished the original short, Disney didn’t like it initially.

I don’t know if they didn’t like it, but they didn’t know what to do about it.

But they didn’t ask you to return to work afterward.
Yeah, yeah.

So do you get some sort of satisfaction out of the fact that, nearly 30 years later, here you are making Frankenweenie for Disney?

Sure, why not? But I’ve been back and forth to Disney a few times, so it’s kind of an open revolving-door policy. I’ve been around enough to know how absurd everything is. Any project that gets made is a miracle, and I’m grateful to each one, and each one is surreal. So I’m used to it. It’s okay. [Laughs]

Well, of course you’re part of a great group of people, including Brad Bird and John Lasseter, who were let go by Disney, only to return years later.

Those guys could have been making Pixar movies 10 years earlier! They had the talent. It was there!

Video: "TiM," a Stop-Motion Tribute to Burton

Ken Turner's TiM:

TiM from Ken Turner on Vimeo.

Animator Ken Turner has been a fan of Tim Burton's films for many years. In an ultimate tribute to the filmmaker, Turner made TiM, a short stop-motion film in the style of Mr. Burton's own short film, Vincent, which was an homage to his own childhood idol, Vincent Price. After years in the making, Turner's TiM is gathering recognition, making the rounds online and in film festivals.

I spoke with Mr. Turner to learn more about the making of his animated tribute.




When did you first come up with this project?

In 2002, I came up with the idea when I was in my second year of college at Sheridan taking art fundamental courses and was applying to get into the animation program. Every year there would be screenings of the animation graduates final year films. So I knew that if I got in that I'd have to come up with a film idea in my final year. It was one night out of the blue when I woke up and scribbled down on a scrap piece of paper something like "boy who wants to be like tim burton.....like vincent". I probably still have the piece of paper somewhere in a box. It was to be somewhat a "re-imagining" of the story of "Vincent" but for a generation who were brought up on Tim Burton films, just as Tim grew up watching Vincent Price films. I wanted it to be a auto-biography/biography type film by pulling things that I read about Tim Burton's childhood and from my own childhood. One of the first things I read was about how he convinced the other kids in the neighborhood that aliens had landed and started a war. So I tried to build a narrative around those kind of elements.




When did you begin production?

Before actually production began, I was able to work on the film in my spare time during my years prior to getting into the animation program and after. During that time I was able to work out all the character designs, the poem, the storyboards and what equipment I was going to need to film it. From September 2006 to April 2007 was when actually production of the armatures of the characters, set/prop construction and the shooting of the animation began. I was very fortunate to have a lot of friends and colleagues who were able to come in and give their time by making sets, props, costumes or animating a scene. The production of the film was done in the basement of the house I was living in during college. It was nicknamed "The Batcave" because it was very dark and not alot of natural light got in. There were spiders and spider webs on ceilings, mice would get in sometimes but I like to think it all added to the atmosphere while making the film.




Was this your first time working in the medium of stop-motion animation?

I had never worked in stop motion before but I had visited a stop motion studio in Toronto and was very inspired by that experience. I had made a traditional animated short film prior which was called "Attack of the Giant Vegetable Monsters". I believe that film was very important to make in order to get "TiM" made because I was able to see first hand all the things that needed to be done for an animated short film to get made. During school there were not a lot of stop motion films being made. They were either traditional or 3D, and stop motion wasn't taught either. So all my education was from books or films. The behind the scenes featurettes from the films of Ray Harryhausen, Tim Burton, Henry Selick were invaluable in the production of "TiM". I think now Sheridan has alot of stop-motion films coming out every year and there is even classes/facilities for students to make films at school.




How do you think Tim Burton's work have affected your films?

I believe his work has had a very meaningful impact on my films and art. I think what I get from his films is how personal they are. So that made me think about making films very differently and how cathartic they can made. "TiM" was definitely a way for me to express my thoughts about growing up but at the same time showing how much those films mean to me.



What is the future of your short film, "TiM"?

Hopefully I can keep it on the web and let have its own life online. During February 2011 it played at the New York LES (Lower East Side) Film Festival as an opening night selection and an animation night selection. I'll keep pursuing other ways for people to see it like film festivals which can always breath new life into it and let it be seen by new audiences worldwide.



You can learn more about Ken Turner and TiM in the following links:

Ken Turner's Blog
Ken Turner's Vimeo Profile
TiM Film Production Blog

Tim Burton's 5 Favorite Films

RottenTomatoes asked Tim Burton what five of his favorite films are. Here was his answer:



Dracula A.D. 1972 (1972)

"It was a great year for films. [laughs] Seeing that movie is one of the reasons I wanted to move to London, because it's quite swinging -- it's like this weird mixture of a Hammer horror film and swinging London. There's a scene where they cut from, I don't know, 1569 or whatever, and it cuts to rock music and a jet airplane, so there's a weird juxtaposition of things. I've gotten to know Christopher Lee over the years and I know that he would not say that this was one of his favorite films. I think it was Hammer on the decline and they thought, 'Hey, let's get hip,' which was a mistake. But I enjoy mistakes sometimes."



The Wicker Man (1974)

"It's like a weird musical. That is actually one of Christopher's favorite movies that he did, unlike the last one. It was not a very successful movie when it came out but it's really quite a hypnotic and amazing film I think. It's like a weird dream. Some of these films I can't kind of watch over, because they play in your mind like a dream. It reminds me of growing up in Burbank. Things are quite normal on the surface but underneath they're not quite what they seem. I found this film to be such a strange mixture; the elements are very odd."




The Golden Voyage of Sinbad (1973)

"Ray Harryhausen is another inspiration to me. He did it all himself, too, you know, in the days when it was difficult to do that. In his characters -- even the things that had no character -- you could feel an artist at work there. You could feel his hand in it, and that's rare, in any kind of film. His acting was better than the acting of the humans. It really tapped in to what I like about movies, I mean, the fantasy but also that handmade element, when you can see the movement of the characters -- it's like Frankenstein or Pinocchio, taking an inanimate object and having it come to life. That's why I still like to do stop-motion projects."



War of the Gargantuas (1970)

"One of my favorites. It's my two-year-old daughter's favorite movie. She's the green gargantua and my other son is the brown one, and she loves being the bad green gargantua. She's obsessed with it, as I was. I grew up watching Japanese science fiction movies and I particularly, unlike most hard core film people, like dubbed movies -- there's something about that language and the translation that somehow fits into the movie; it's like a weird poetry. There's a beauty to these films, the Japanese character designs -- there's a human kind of quality to these things, which I love. Monsters were always the most soulful characters. I don't know if it's because the actors were so bad, but the monsters were always the emotional focal point."



The Omega Man (1971)

"Seeing Charlton Heston reciting lines from Woodstock and wearing jumpsuits that look like he's out of Gilligan's Island -- there are lots of good things. The thing I liked about this is that the vampire characters were played by real people. They had a really cool look to them -- black robes, dark glasses. Not Charlton Heston with his shirt off. [laughs] I was kind of obsessed by him, because he's like the greatest bad actor of all time. Between this and Planet of the Apes and Soylent Green and The Ten Commandments -- I know that was a religious film but I always thought it was like the first zombie movie. He starts out like this real person and by the end he's like this weird zombie."

Interview with Cannes Jury Pres Burton

© AFP

The official Cannes Film Festival website has an exclusive interview with Tim Burton, who will preside as the Jury President this year. The interview asks the filmmaker about movies he took dates to, which filmmaker he would most like to be for a few hours, which actors he wish he could've directed, and much more:

An interview before he disappears for 12 days into the darkened theatres of the Palais…


What is your first film memory?
It was Jason and the Argonauts.

What made you want to make films?
Watching monster movies… In Jason and the Argonauts, watching Ray Harryhausen’s creations made me want to become both an animator and/or a filmmaker.

Is there a film you never get tired of watching?
There are several. Ones you watch anytime you want. It’s strange, there’s a weird one like Where Eagles Dare; it’s a movie that everytime it’s on TV, I watch it, because there’s a mood to it, in the snow, and you have the soundtrack and the quietness… Same thing with The Omega Man. There are certain films I would watch anytime, even if I had seen them the day before.

Which scene from a film gives you the greatest sense of emotion?
I can remember when I first saw King Kong falling off the Empire State Building… I got very emotional about that! And it’s kind of the same at the end of any monster movie when they die. I always get very sad and emotional at the end of almost every monster movie!

Do you have a cult line of dialogue?
I always laugh when Charlton Heston says to the Zombies in The Omega Man : “Are you fellas really with the Internal Revenue Service?” There’s something about that line that always made me laugh!

Which film would you like to live inside?
The movies kind of create a mood… I guess any Mario Bava film. I always liked the spirit, the look of those, so I guess I would like to live in one of his films.

Which film would you show to someone if you were trying to seduce them?
Well, I remember going on at a date in a drive-in, one of the first dates I ever had, and there was a double bill of Clockwork Orange and Deliverance… So I wouldn’t suggest that! It didn’t work very well!

In which other filmmaker’s skin would you like to spend a few hours?
I guess it would be people I never knew or met but whose films I liked, like I would have loved to have known Mario Bava, what he was like, because I like his films very much. So I guess I’ll never have the opportunity to meet somebody like that.

Which actor or actress would you have liked to direct?
In history? I’ve always had a real soft spot for Peter Lorre or Boris Karloff... But I’ve been lucky to be able to have people I admired, like Christopher Lee.

Which book would you like to adapt?
I think books are quite difficult to adapt. It has to be a book that you think is very good. I would be very leery of adapting a book that I liked. But even if I did like it, I wouldn’t want to adapt it.

Which film ending would you most like to change?
Maybe The Sound of Music, I would kill them all off at the end. The whole family!

In your opinion, which event or invention created a before and an after in the history of cinema?
Like sound and colour? Any time a new technology is invented, there’s a before and an after. But I don’t agree with things like saying 3D is a turning-point, because I don’t think it’s the only tool. Even when colour came in, I still like to do black and white. There are so many elements, so many tools, it’s great that they’re all there. It’s like animation: when computer animation came in, they stopped doing drawn animation. And luckily, even after computers, there are still drawers in animation. So it’s best to not think too much about before and afters in my opinion.

In your opinion, just how far can cinema go?
The great think is, it’s all about emotion and story... That was there at the beginning and that will be there at the end, no matter what the technology is. That’s the great thing about it: it’s always got a very simple, kind of human purity to it. That’s a good thing. It can constantly change and everything can happen, and yet the core thing about affecting somebody stays the same, which is beautiful.

Do you have any particular ritual or obsessive behaviour connected with the Cannes Festival?
It’s just like a weird dream. So let’s just the dream happen! I think it’s best not to plan too much. Don’t you think?

What do you most like doing when you are not making films?
I like having time where I’m not doing anything. That’s the time where you actually create the most, when you’re just looking out the window or looking at a tree. It’s at those times in life that you’re just like spacing out, which is rare. So I like to have as much of that time as you can have, because I think that’s the time where you are actually doing the most work, in a strange way.

Is there any question that you would really want to ask and to whom?
I guess the whole British government, like “What’s the hell is going on”? And I think the whole country wants to know what’s going on!