6 POST: TIM BURTON a biography

Tim Burton

Fill in the gaps in this biography of Tim Burton

Tim Burton was born in 1958, in the city of Burbank, California.

He remains without question one of the most original film directors working in Hollywood today.

Indeed, his talent and originality have kept him at the top of the profession where he occupies a very special place, somewhere in the mainstream and the avant-garde, in that region of cinema occupied by artists where worldview is an unconventional that it attains popular appeal.

In 1989, Tim Burton directed the hugely successful Batman which, although his first personal film, was one of the most seen movies of all time and gave him unprecedented fame in Hollywood, considering the originality and adventurousness of his next films (for example Beetlejuice in 1988).

Edward Scissorhands (1990), another hit, saw him at the peak of his artistic powers and established a fruitful working period with the actor Johnny Depp who played in his 2005 film _____________of Roald Dahl’s book Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and who became one of his most esteemed friend since their first film together.

In 1992, Batman Returns was a such more a darker film than the original, a reflection of how much the freedom Tim Burton had won ( as Warner Bros were reputedly unhappy with the final result).

And even for Ed Wood (1994), his loving tribute to the life and work of the legendary ‘Worst Director of All Time’ Edward D. Wood, Jr., was a box-office disaster, it got some of the best critics of Burton’s career.

In fact, Tim Burton is known  both for his dark, quirky-themed mood like Sleepy Hollow, Corpse Bride, Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, or Dark Shadows (2012) and for Blockbuster such as Pee-Wee's Big Adventure, Batman, Planet of the Apes, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and Alice in Wonderland (2010), one of his most  criticised films, which became the fifth highest-grossing film of all List of highest grossing films.

Burton has directed 18 feature films as of 2014, and has got 12 as of 2012  (among which the very nice stop-motion tale called The  Nightmare Before Christmas in 1993).

All in all, Tim Burton’s films consistently challenge the spectator’s expectations, push forward the techniques of filmmaking and bring to life previously unthinkable characters  (like Edward Scissorhands).

Taken as a whole, his work is based on the confrontation between the fantastic and the realistique, and the consequences of these two worlds intermingling.

Big Fish, Burton’s 2003 effort, is no different. And even if, somehow, it is not really the best.

On the surface, it would appear to have all the characteristics of a classic Burton film: a magic screenplay, fairy-tale characters, flights of imagination, forces of nature ( as well as the supernatural), far-fetched situations and vastly imaginative visual style and imagery. The movie is, in fact, is packed with fanciful episodes that it begins to feel as a loose adaptation of The Odyssey, told from the mouth of an aging character named Ed Bloom, a story-writer  and dreamer who sees the world with beautiful eyes.