Spindly misanthropic protagonists, high contrast lighting, and darkly whimsical aesthetics: There’s absolutely no mistaking a Tim Burton film. The auteur certainly brings a singular artistic perspective to his work, but how did the Burtonesque art style come to be, and how has it shaped film and TV? Discover the science behind the spooky-sweet Burton aesthetic here.
The Burtonesque art style is a fabulous celebration of the melancholy—imagine creepy, curling lines, intense shadows, a heavy dose of the Gothic, and an overall atmosphere of strangeness and peculiarity. If there’s one word to describe his art style, it might be “eclectic.”
Tim Burton characteristics
Dark shadows and contrasting vibrant colors: The director’s style is characterized by several aesthetic mainstays, including a distinctively dark color palette. And yet Burton’s films have a surprising amount of diversity despite their shared directorial language, from the brightly lit absurdity of “Pee-wee’s Big Adventure” to the moody atmosphere of later films like “Batman” and “Edward Scissorhands.”
Expressionist and Gothic elements: Burton’s trademark style can be traced back to a few various sources, but the most prevalent among them is German Expressionism. The style—“one of the most recognizable styles of silent cinema,” according to the BFI—is often characterized by “tilting, impossible sets, high angles and deep shadows.” Perhaps the best representative of the cinematic style is Robert Wiene’s 1920 “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari,” which takes place in a bizarre, distorted world that looks like it was taken directly out of “The Nightmare Before Christmas” or “Corpse Bride.” Or, as Roger Ebert described it, “The actors inhabit a jagged landscape of sharp angles and tilted walls and windows, staircases climbing crazy diagonals, trees with spiky leaves, grass that looks like knives.”
But Burton’s art style isn’t strictly Expressionist; there’s also a deep vein of the Gothic running throughout his work. Deeply inspired by Roger Corman’s Poe Cycle and classic Universal and Hammer horror—Burton’s works are brimming with Gothic revival aesthetics. Think, for example, of the Nevermore Academy in “Wednesday” or Vincent Price’s castle in “Edward Scissorhands.” Burton has even used several real castles to get that ghoulishly Gothic look, including Belgium’s Castle Torenhof in “Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children” and the Trafalgar Castle School in “Dark Shadows.”
Juxtaposition of bizarre and normal: Burton doesn’t just mimic the Gothic style for the sake of it; the director juxtaposes the moody and the macabre with the manufactured “civility” of American suburbia, perhaps a direct result of the moody teen Burton’s upbringing in sunny Burbank, California. This contrast between the grotesque and the ordinary, often flipping perceptions of the two on their head, is key to his art style. Consider, for example, the “strange and unusual” Lydia Deetz in “Beetlejuice,” whose goth look and power of empathy set her apart from her parents and their high-society peers. Or, for a more modern example, just look at Wednesday of the eponymous show, whose difference from her peers is epitomized in the split-down-the-middle dorm room she shares with pink-loving werewolf Enid Sinclair.
Stop-motion animation: The uncanny look and feel of the stop-motion style is a perfect companion to Burton’s dark and absurd take on the world. Many of the films of Burton’s oeuvre (”The Nightmare Before Christmas,” “Corpse Bride,” and “Frankenweenie”) are fully animated using stop motion—but this incredible and labor-intensive animation process also makes appearances in “Pee-wee’s Big Adventure” and “Beetlejuice.”
An overall celebration of the weird: It’s this characteristic that drives the others and hammers home Burton’s artistic style. Outside of the spooky and supernatural, Burton is equally interested in the weirdness found in the spectacle of science fiction B-movies. This interest clearly shines in two Burton classics, “Mars Attacks” and “Ed Wood.” The former, a wacky alien-invasion tale replete with homages to films like “The Day the Earth Stood Still,” “The War of the Worlds,” and “Plan 9 from Outer Space,” comedically spoofs the ’50s sci-fi film genre as a whole.
How does Burton create his trademark style?
Burton might be one of the clearest examples of what it means to “steal like an artist.” In other words, like all artists, he takes bits and pieces of everything that inspires him and then remixes and remakes it into something completely original. He’s not quiet about his inspirations or about his desire to bring his singular vision to all his projects, something enthusiastic young creatives should aim to mimic. Speaking on his work to Museum of the Moving Image in 2003, Burton posited, “I think you have to relate everything to what you do, just because that’s your only reference of how to get something done and achieve something.”
This doesn’t just go for filmmakers in Burton’s position, either; every artist can learn something from the director’s style. Actors—regardless of if they’re looking to get cast in a Tim Burton production or something else—can heed the creative’s advice and find inspiration in performances they like, studying them intensely and intently and incorporating that back into their own work.
And since all art is the combination of the works that came before it and the artist’s unique perspectives, any creative hoping to make their own style is best served by loving and honoring the creative work they’re most passionate about. Making the best art is about making what you want to see—the movies that quite literally no one else can make. Even in situations where yours isn’t the only creative vision for a project, you can make it more your own (more “you”-esque, if you will) by finding those points that you relate to.
Burton’s visionary art style has influenced vast swaths of the modern cultural landscape. His films speak to the misanthropic weirdo in all of us, so it’s no wonder countless creatives have drawn inspiration from his work, including:
- Guillermo Del Toro: As a fellow horror-loving outsider, Del Toro employs tropes that could easily be labeled Burtonesque, including loner protagonists, villainous “normies,” high contrasts between dark and light, and stylized art design that mixes period-specific authenticity with an eye for the wondrous. It can be hard not to mistake Del Toro’s Gothic romance “Crimson Peak” for a Burton original, and not just because the film stars “Alice in Wonderland” star Mia Wasikowska.
- Jhonen Vasquez: On TV, one can find the Burtonesque in works like Vasquez’s “Invader Zim.” His highly stylized character designs and plot about an incompetent alien trying to take over the Earth feels right at home in the Burton-verse.
- Vivienne Medrano: The hit Prime Video/A24 animated series “Hazbin Hotel” wears its Burton and Vasquez inspiration on its stripe-covered sleeves, with series creator Medrano telling the Hollywood Reporter that “‘Invader Zim’ was huge for me—the sharpness and the expressions of that, and how spindly everything was. Kind of the same with Tim Burton.”
Not only did his work inspire artists with their own creations, but Burton’s “Batman” films have a distinct legacy in the caped crusader’s cultural trajectory. Audiences familiar with Adam West’s goofy portrayal throughout the ’60s and ’70s were surprised and delighted by Burton’s darkly whimsical take and his spectacularly Gothic fresh look for Gotham City, affecting its look in film, TV, and comics ever since.
