The Art of Tim Burton: Exploring Dark Fantasy and Gothic Aesthetics

Characterised by darkened images of the uncanny and a public persona of off-beat peculiarity, Tim Burton has cultivated a reputation as an eccentric, unruly and irreverent figure. With a career spanning both live-action and animation, the Calrifornia-born filmmaker and producer places a macabre-twist on everything he touches, from superhero and science-fiction cinema to biographical dramas and musical fantasies. However, it is in his use of stop-motion animation that his grotesque array of monsters and misfits really find their home. This animation technique truly enables Burton to explore his fascination with bodily difference, disfigurement, and disassembly.

In this talk, Dr Christopher Holliday considers how Burton’s fascination with bodies that are wrought with instability, conflict, and disruption are well-served by the strangeness of stop-motion as an uncanny form of animation. We will look at Burton’s early animated career as an artist and training at the California Institute of the Arts, before turning to his work as an animator and designer at the Walt Disney Studio. Together we will explore how Burton’s departure from Disney, his development of a counter style rooted in the Victorian gothic, and his embracing of stop-motion aesthetics in Corpse Bride (2005), and Frankenweenie (2012) have all influenced how we understand Burton’s identity as a Hollywood outsider. By reflecting on Burton’s contribution to the development of animation as an art form over the last forty years, this talk reveals how his haunting visual style and artistic connections to the gothic in have come to perfectly symbolise the career of a filmmaker whose identity has remained increasingly difficult to place.

Doors open at 7pm, talk starts at 7.30pm - come down early to grab a good seat!

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Dr Christopher Holliday is Senior Lecturer in Liberal Arts and Visual Cultures Education at King’s College London. He has published widely on Hollywood cinema and animation history, and is the author of The Computer-Animated Film: Industry, Style and Genre (2018) and co-editor of Fantasy/Animation: Connections Between Media, Mediums and Genres (2018) and Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs: New Perspectives on Production, Reception, Legacy (2021). He has written multiple book chapters and articles on animation and contemporary media culture for academic publications, as well as for Total Film, The Independent, and The Conversation, and spoken on animation around the world, including at the British Film Institute and Cinema Museum in London and recently at the Annecy Film Festival in France. He can also be found as the curator and creator of the website, blog, and podcast Fantasy/Animation.

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