Column: Report from New York
by Steve Starger

Tim Burton’s Toy Box

Johnny Carson famously joked about broadcasting from “beautiful downtown Burbank,” the city that housed his boss, NBC. The line inevitably got a laugh, particularly from Angelenos who knew Burbank as one of the myriad cookie-cutter ’burbs of greater Los Angeles.

Tim Burton grew up in Burbank, and, as a sprawling exhibition of his drawings, paintings, sketches, and animations at the Museum of Modern Art makes clear, he put his own, Burtonesque spin on Carson’s sarcastic crack about his hometown.

Yes, Tim Burton is one of those artists whose name has become an adjective because his work is sui generis. There’s no mistaking a Tim Burton flick—the off-kilter mise-en-scène; the neo-psychedelic primary colors; the eerie yet entrancing blacks and whites; and, of course, the characters, from Beetlejuice to Edward Scissorhands to Ed Wood to Batman to Sweeney Todd. Outsiders all, they maintain a quality of humanity that can’t be denied by an uncaring or uninterested world.

Little Timmy Burton clearly felt such otherness, growing up in a West Coast version of New York’s Levittown, where former underground cartoonist Bill Griffith discovered his own wild alter ego, Zippy the Pinhead. It’s certainly unfair to define the singular talents of a Tim Burton or a Bill Griffith solely by geography, but there is no denying that the soul-deadening environments in which they were raised factored into their budding views of a world they didn’t understand and which didn’t understand them.

Ironically, Burbank is also home to Warner Bros. and Disney, both of whom employed Burton as he moved from being a student at CalArts (a feeder school for animators that was founded by Disney) to a full-fledged professional animator and filmmaker. While movies became the main canvas for Burton‘s Grand Guignol-cum-vaudeville circus visions, he also used crayons, pastels, watercolors, markers, pencils, pens, and ink to create a world of freaks and dreamers that he continues to limn on paper. as well as film.

MoMA’s treatment of Burton’s varied and copious media is a bit of an assault on unsuspecting senses, But how else to display Burton’s free-roaming imagination, a thing constantly in motion, and that continues to produce hundreds upon hundreds of strange and hilarious works? From the second the visitor steps off the elevator and into the museum’s third floor exhibition space, Tim Burton’s world takes over. Paintings, drawings, storyboards, maquettes, full-size props from his movies, and some things indescribable, spill out like the contents of a child’s toy chest—a very creative, very solitary child who revels in his nightmarish creations.

While waiting in line for the show, visitors can watch a bank of monitors showing Burton’s black-and-white animated shorts, a pleasant enough diversion. But the real evidence that Kansas and Burbank have been left far behind is a darkened and black-lit entry room, fashioned to give the sensation of being swallowed by a gigantic, hungry maw. The centerpiece here is a large, glowing construction that resembles the mother ship from Close Encounters of the Third Kind, a demented carousel, and a birthday cake that has lost its senses.

It’s no surprise to note that Burton takes a dim view of clowns—his series of oils push the cliché of the malevolent, creepy clown to its limits. These creatures, their phony red wigs blazing like wildfires, wield axes and quaff from a bottle labeled with a skull and crossbones. Their wide, evil grins display shark teeth, much like Pennywise the Clown in Stephen King’s It. You are convinced that these clowns from hell would eat you alive if they could.

If killer clowns don’t do it for you, there are plenty of other items to focus on. For Burton movie fans—which were legion at a recent showing—there is the “question mark” door from Ed Wood; Edward Scissorhands in all his poignant glory; and the lightbulb-headed Martians from Mars Attacks! Democrats in the crowd can giggle over a watercolor-and-ink sketch of Ronald Reagan that’s as scary as Burton’s clowns. Fans of the Burton’s Batman movies can linger over the pastel of a truly insane Joker and an ink drawing of the Caped Crusader himself sporting large, scary teeth.

Burton’s early ink-and-marker drawings include scenes from his early short film, Vincent, in which a scraggly-haired boy dreams of being Vincent Price. Another early animation character, the doomed Oyster Boy, is also represented.

At one crowded Sunday visit to the exhibit, the galleries were filled with mothers pushing toddlers in carriages. With its abundance of cartoons and drawings, it would seem a natural outing for kids. But young moms should be warned: unless you want to use Burton’s drawings as a kind of exorcism for your child’s darker thoughts, this show isn’t for the Bambi and Simba crowd. Kids tend to be resilient, though; it’s the parents who might find odd images infiltrating their dreams.

That said, the plight of an Edward Scissorhands, a hated outcast through no fault of his own, stands as a positive example and—dare I say it—a good role model for those children who can’t throw strikeout pitches or touchdown passes.

It’s a Burtonesque world after all.

Steve Starger is a freelance writer and co-author of Wally’s World: The Brilliant Life and Tragic Death of Wally Wood, the World’s Second Best Comic-Book Artist.