Tim Burton on Alice, Frankenweenie
Sweeney Todd Director Talks About Upcoming Disney Films
Tim Burton has returned to the Mouse House. The acclaimed director, who started as an animator on The Fox and the Hound and later oversaw the stop-motion classic The Nightmare Before Christmas, is working on two 3-D remakes for Disney. The first flick is Burton's version of a story Walt himself worked on, the other is a remake of one of his earliest films.
Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland
The first 3-D flick that Burton will direct for Disney is a live-action/motion capture remake of Lewis Carroll's classic children's tale, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. The book, filled with hookah-huffing caterpillars, porpoise puns, lobster quadrilles and croquet-obsessed queens, is a natural fit for Burton's "gothic carnival" imagery.
"It's just such a classic, and the imagery is so surreal," Burton told Sci-Fi Wire while promoting his latest film, the live-action Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street. "I don't know; I've never seen a version where I feel like they got it all. It's a series of weird adventures, and to try to do it where it works as a movie will be interesting."
The best-known of those failed versions is, of course, Walt Disney's 1951's animated film. Long considered one of the lesser films in Walt Disney's animated canon, Alice in Wonderland received a hostile reaction from British critics and disappointing box office on its initial release. It was the only Silver Age animated film to never be re-released theatrically during Walt's lifetime.
"(Alice in Wonderland) suffered from too many cooks - directors," legendary Disney animator Ward Kimball told Leonard Maltin. "Here was a case of five directors each trying to top the other guy and make his sequence the biggest and craziest in the show. This had a self-canceling effect on the final product."
In the late 1960's, Alice in Wonderland became extremely popular (much to Disney's dismay) as a "head flick:" a movie that university students would watch while under the influence of recreational pharmaceuticals. The original story, filled with Carroll's lysergic imagery, has a long history of appealing to the drug culture.
"The stories are like drugs for children, you know?" Burton says. "It's like, 'Whoa, man.' The imagery, they've never quite nailed making it compelling as a full story. So I think it's an interesting challenge to direct."
Tim Burton's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland is tentatively scheduled for a late 2008 release.
Burton Admits to Remaking Frankenweenie
In a preview screening for Enchanted, Disney chairman inadvertently spilled the beans that Tim Burton was working on another stop-motion project for the Mouse House. Later, an anonymous source told AICN that Burton was in fact remaking his 1984 live-action short Frankenweenie as a stop-motion film.
Despite the fact that Disney was reportedly furious with news of their upcoming projects getting leaked onto Cyberland, Burton has now 'fessed up that Frankenweenie will be his next movie, after Alice hits theatres.
"We're going to do that real low-budget," Burton told Sci-Fi Wire. "The thing that excites me about it and that will make it different is that when I look at my original drawings, there are certain things that are in those that I couldn't get in the live action when I made the film. So I'm quite excited to try to get a certain emotion and other characters in the new version, and I want to make it a slightly bigger story."
Frankenweenie was originally a live-action short, made in 1984 and starring The Shining actress Shelley Duvall, an early Burton booster. The short, about a boy who reanimates his dead pitbull terrier Sparky, received many kudos when it was screened at film festivals.
Despite the short's critical acclaim, Disney refused to release it, believing it was too scary for kids. The Mouse House gave Burton the derriere velocité, only to beg him to return after the runaway success of Pee-Wee's Big Adventure, Beetlejuice, and Batman.
The short exhibits elements of Burton's developing style, but the director was still young enough that Frankenweenie wore his influences (director Edward R. Wood Jr., horror actor Vincent Price and stop-motion maestro Ray Harryhausen) on its sleeve. Burton's heroes would go on to influence such films as Corpse Bride, Edward Scissorhands, and his cinematic tribute to the "worst director of all time," Ed Wood.
"I'm such a fan of old movies, and I think that just stays with you," Burton said. "It doesn't leave you. Those kinds of things, whether you think about them or not, they just are in your DNA, and they stay with you. Even if I was doing a romantic comedy I would probably stick a bunch of shadows in there or whatever."
The full-length, 3-D Frankenweenie due in 2009.
