Assignment #17-Emma Shadwick-Tim Burton

Tim Burton has directed lots of movies and short films that can best be described as odd or atypical. From unique children’s stories like Alice in Wonderland to gut-wrenching horror like Sleepy Hollow. There are also plenty in between such as Edward Scissorhands and Beetlejuice that contain elements of both. Across his films, he has a consistent director’s style that could be described as twisted, which means two things. On one hand, reality and fantasy become one. On the other, there are always darker elements to his characters and plot. Tim Burton establishes a twisted style with the use of cinematic techniques like lighting and motif and the way they add to each film. Evidence is being used from two of his features that I have recently watched: Edward Scissorhands and  “Vincent.”

To start off, Tim Burton is fond of using lighting to portray emotion. More specifically, he uses low-key lighting to convey a dark, tortured mood that his character is experiencing to his viewers. In his short “Vincent,” it goes completely dark except for his eyes when the young boy, Vincent, is sitting at his desk and begins to go man. In Edward Scissorhands, it is dark when he is sitting alone in the attic of his desolate mansion on the hill. These examples convey a twisted style because Burton utilizes low-key lighting more frequently than high-key. This is because most of his characters have a dark side that they tap into, which is generally what he prefers to emphasize.

Secondly, Tim Burton has a preference for dark-haired, pale outsiders as his protagonists. Edward Scissorhands and the young boy Vincent are cardinal examples. They were both set apart from normalcy around them because of their abnormal features. For Edward Scissorhands, it was his hands that were scissors that kept society from truly accepting him and ended up driving him back to the desolate mansion he came from. For Vincent, it was his aspiration to be Vincent Price that kept him from being a normal kid and going to play with friends or even going outside. These demonstrations of one of Tim Burton’s favored motifs adds to the twisted style in each of these films because of the sheer peculiarity of these qualities that the characters possess. They resemble nothing realistic that a  person in real-life could relate to.