Tim Burton at MoMA

MoMA has a giant (and I mean giant) exhibit up right now devoted to the work of Tim Burton, and any time I’ve walked by there since the exhibit went up (especially on weekends) there is a line around the block. Not exaggerating. People lined up outside and around the block. I love Tim Burton but that line was always daunting to me. Should I go join it? My friend then told me that she got free tickets, and would I like to go? We went yesterday afternoon, and while it was a mob scene at first (which was a bit annoying because you couldn’t get close to the things on the walls, to read the little placards – the crowd was often 5 people deep at any given spot) – but eventually it thinned out a bit, and we were able to wander around to our hearts’ content, going from wall to wall, lingering (I love to linger in musuems). It’s a comprehensive exhibit, involving artwork, metal sculptures, films, figures used in his animation, and also things like posters he designed when he was a kid, and some of his early sketches from high school and college. The exhibit is organized chronologically, so, ideally, you can start from beginning to end to watch his evolution. We really didn’t do it that way, due to how crowded it was. We were just looking for open spots in the mayhem.

Most of the things on the wall were sketches, things literally ripped out of notebooks – you could see the tears in the pages, and as I moved along, I really got the sense of an obsessive mind at work. These are, essentially, doodles. But there were also specific sketches for all of his films, characters and settings, some of them more elaborate than others – watercolors, etc., while some were just pencil sketches. There were also items from some of his films on display – the angora sweater Johnny Depp wore in Ed Wood, the burnt wooden figures from the beginning of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – and then glass cases with recognizable small figures from his animated features (I loved looking at these – they were exquisite grotesque caricatures).

A couple of things I took note of that I really liked: His handwriting is very childlike, even recently, and there were hand-written notes on scripts he had written, and notes for characters. There was a character sketch of Edward Scissorhands, written in long-hand, that read like a personal ad. “Edward has pale skin and intense eyes. He enjoys creating ice sculptures.” One of his notes for Beetlejuice said something like: “This must be a very human story.” You can feel his creative mind at work. How specifically he thinks of things, how his vision operates. I also loved that while he obviously makes use of high-end technology, this is a guy who passes people hand-written notes. I can’t picture Tim Burton texting. There was a long note to Johnny Depp about a moment he wanted in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, a line he wanted to add, and he wondered how Johnny Depp would feel about said line and if that seemed okay to him? If Johnny liked the line, he’d make sure to add it into the script. A hand-written note to Johnny Depp. I really like that mix of old-school and new-fangled machines that Tim Burton has always embodied. Even with Alice in Wonderland, there was often a sense that you were looking at something real. The Red Queen’s meeting room, for example, and the tea party in the woods – Obviously computers are generating some of it, but there is a tangible sense of reality to it – and I loved seeing Tim Burton’s hand-written notes for this stuff, up on the wall at MoMA.

There was also a very moving display of a children’s book he had written when he was 17 years old. It was about a monster, a big pink dragon-like creature. Burton, as a teenager, had sent it to the Walt Disney company (ironically), asking for feedback (and obviously for help). A copy of the letter Tim Burton had written to the company had obviously been unearthed. It was hand-written, ballpoint pen, with a spelling error (“layed” for “laid”), and he basically said, Here is something I have written. Is this something you would like? Amazingly, an editor at Walt Disney wrote back to him. And there the letter was on the wall, above the glass case containing said children’s book, and it was such a generous letter – you can see why Tim Burton kept it forever. The person who received the manuscript obviously saw something in Burton, and took the time to respond, specifically. She thanked him for the book and gave him some notes. The first one was that the plot seemed to be “derivative of Dr. Seuss”, but she said it in a way that wasn’t crushing, or like “Don’t even try, CHiPs”. She was just making an observation, which hopefully would be helpful. Her second note was something like (and I wish I had written down her exact wording): “Knowing that you don’t have professional tools at your disposal, I have to say that your illustrations are extraordinary, and I think you will go very far in whatever you want to do. You have a gift, and I suggest you keep at it.” Something totally awesome like that. Encouragement of a young artist. It’s so important. Tim Burton wasn’t created in a vacuum. Teachers can be so instrumental in telling a student, “Keep going … keep going …”

Some of the random sketches on the wall were so funny that you could hear people guffawing across the room, while looking at them. It was a really fun atmosphere. A congenial comedic vibe. I had a couple of moments with other random people there, when we’d all be looking at the same sketch, and laughing about it. For example, there was a very simply drawn cartoon, with a title scrawled above it: The Snail Who Wanted to be a Ballet Dancer. The drawing was of a snail, and out of the snail’s “head” came a thought bubble, and in the thought bubble were two leaping figures doing a pas de deux. The caption read: “Vladimir dreamed of being a ballet dancer but he couldn’t because he had no legs.” This kind of thing strikes my funny bone. Its absurdity, its simplicity. I kept coming back to it, because the humor kept satisfying me.

There were screens on the walls, too, playing early animated sketches, and also (gloriously) horror movies he had filmed with his friends when he was in college. There was one where there was a talking bloody head in a garbage can, and a poor boy was trying to deal with it, what should he do? He picks up the head and throws it off to the side, and then you get a shot of the head, lying on the ground, eyes open, still talking.

The exhibit runs through April 26, and I’m not sure if they plan on taking it on the road, to other museums, but I highly recommend it (great for kids, too – I wish Cashel had been with me) – and don’t let the crowds get you down. If you wait it out, you’ll feel the ebb and flow of the throngs, and while it was a madhouse when we first walked into the exhibit, that changed, and left us in a more open space, where we could linger, and get close to the images.

A portrait of an artist who has a truly personal vision, a guy who has been working on the same themes and images for years – you can see versions of his later work as early as his college years when he started to find his legs as an artist – the exhibit is a great tribute to one of our most personal filmmakers working today. A guy who could have been just an antisocial nerd, you really get the sense of his isolation in a lot of these drawings, but who translated his obsessions/dreams/nightmares into art.

Well worth seeing.

Below the jump, there’s a video from MoMA about the exhibit, with a great interview with Burton.