Timothy Walter Burton (born August 25, 1958) is an American filmmaker, and former animator. He is known for pioneering goth subculture in Hollywood, with his films employing a distinctive style that blends gothic horror and dark fantasy aesthetics with whimsical and surreal elements. He has received numerous accolades, including one Emmy Award and nominations for two Academy Awards, a Golden Globe Award, and three BAFTA Awards. He was honored with the Venice International Film Festival's Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement in 2007 and France's Order of Arts and Letters in 2010.
Burton made his directorial debut with the comedy film Pee-wee's Big Adventure (1985) and gained wider prominence for directing Beetlejuice (1988) and Edward Scissorhands (1990), as well as producing The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993), which was based on a poem he wrote. He had directed films spanning a variety of genres such as animation, biopic, drama, fantasy, musical, science fiction, superhero, and supernatural horror; these include Batman (1989), Batman Returns (1992), Ed Wood (1994), Mars Attacks! (1996), Sleepy Hollow (1999), Planet of the Apes (2001), Big Fish (2003), Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2005), Corpse Bride (2005), Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (2007), Alice in Wonderland (2010), Dark Shadows (2012), Frankenweenie (2012), Big Eyes (2014), Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children (2016), Dumbo (2019), and Beetlejuice Beetlejuice (2024).
Burton has directed several episodes of the Netflix series Wednesday (2022–present), for which he was nominated for the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Directing for a Comedy Series. He frequently collaborates with musician Danny Elfman, who has scored all but three of his films. He has also released several books such as The Melancholy Death of Oyster Boy & Other Stories (1997).
Timothy Walter Burton was born in Burbank, California, on August 25, 1958, the son of Jean (née Erickson), who later owned a cat-themed gift shop, and William "Bill" Burton, a former minor league baseball player who worked for the Burbank Parks and Recreation Department. The baseball field at Burbank's Olive Recreation Center is named for Bill.
As a preteen, Burton made short films in his back yard, using crude stop motion animation techniques or shooting on 8 mm film without sound; one of his oldest known films, The Island of Doctor Agor, is an adaptation of the H. G. Wells novel The Island of Doctor Moreau which he made when he was 13 years old. He attended Providencia Elementary School, Luther Burbank Middle School, and Burbank High School, but was not a particularly good student. He played on the water polo team at Burbank High. After graduating in 1976, he attended the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia, Santa Clarita, studying character animation until 1979. As a student there, he made the short films Stalk of the Celery Monster and King and Octopus.
Burton was an introspective person who found pleasure in artwork, drawing, painting, and watching movies. His future work would be heavily influenced by the books of such childhood heroes as Dr. Seuss and Roald Dahl and the aesthetics of silent gothic horror films, Universal Monsters films such as Frankenstein (to which he would continuously pay homage throughout his career), Hammer Horror films starring Christopher Lee, and the horror films of Vincent Price; the latter two would both later star in his films, with Price being honored in his short film Vincent (1982). In a Hollywood Reporter article, Burton said, "I grew up watching the Universal horror movies, Japanese monster movies, and pretty much any kind of monster movie. That was my genre." He also said that his love of Ray Harryhausen's work got him interested in stop-motion animation at a young age.
1981–1987: Early work and breakthrough
Stalk of the Celery Monster attracted the attention of Walt Disney Productions, who offered Burton an animator's apprenticeship at its animation division. He worked as an animator, storyboard artist, graphic designer, art director, and concept artist on films such as The Fox and the Hound (1981), Tron (1982), and The Black Cauldron (1985). His concept art never made it into the finished films.
While at Disney in 1982, Burton made his first short, Vincent, a six-minute black-and-white stop motion film based on a poem written by Burton, which depicts a young boy who fantasizes that he is his hero Vincent Price, with Price himself providing narration. The film was produced by Rick Heinrichs, whom Burton had befriended while working in the concept art department at Disney. The film was shown at the Chicago Film Festival and released, alongside the teen drama Tex, for two weeks in one Los Angeles cinema. This was followed by Burton's first live-action production, Hansel and Gretel, a Japanese-themed adaptation of the Brothers Grimm fairy tale for the Disney Channel, which climaxes in a kung fu fight between Hansel and Gretel and the witch. Having aired once in 1983 at 10:30 P.M. on Halloween and promptly shelved, prints of the film are extremely difficult to locate, fueling rumors that the project did not exist. The short would finally go on public display in 2009 at the Museum of Modern Art, and again in 2011 as part of the Tim Burton art exhibit at LACMA. It was again shown at the Seoul Museum of Art in 2012.
Burton's next live-action short film, Frankenweenie, was released in 1984. It tells the story of a young boy who tries to revive his dog after it is run over by a car. Filmed in black-and-white, it stars Barret Oliver, Shelley Duvall (with whom he would work again in 1986, directing an episode of her television series Faerie Tale Theatre), and Daniel Stern. After Frankenweenie was completed, Disney fired Burton, under the pretext of him spending the company's resources on a film that would be too dark and scary for children to see.
Actor Paul Reubens saw Frankenweenie and chose Burton to direct the cinematic spin-off of his popular character Pee-wee Herman, stating on the audio commentary of 2000 DVD release of Pee-wee's Big Adventure that as soon as the short began, he was sold on Burton's style. Pee-wee Herman gained mainstream popularity with a successful stage show at The Groundlings and the Roxy which was later turned into an HBO special. The film, Pee-wee's Big Adventure, was made on a budget of $8 million and grossed more than $40 million at the North American box office. Burton, a fan of the eccentric musical group Oingo Boingo, asked songwriter Danny Elfman to provide the music for the film. Since then, Elfman has scored every film that Tim Burton has directed, except for Ed Wood, Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, and Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children.
In 1987, Burton contributed to the animated Family Dog episode of the Steven Spielberg-created anthology series Amazing Stories. Written and directed by fellow Disney colleague and future The Iron Giant (1999) and The Incredibles (2004) director Brad Bird, the episode followed the misadventures of a dog through his point of view as he encounters various shenanigans with the family that owns him. Burton would be responsible for handling character designs (which were reminiscent of the designs of Sparky from Frankenweenie), and his longtime collaborator Elfman additionally provided music for the episode. In 1993, Family Dog would be spun off into its own series with Spielberg and Burton executive producing, though Bird had zero involvement; the series only lasted a single season on CBS and was burned off in the summer of that year.
Additionally, Burton directed episodes of the 1985 revival of the '50s/'60s anthology horror series Alfred Hitchcock Presents and Shelley Duvall's Faerie Tale Theatre.
1988–1994: Batman films and acclaim
Burton's next major film was Beetlejuice (1988), a supernatural comedy horror about a young couple forced to cope with life after death and the family of pretentious yuppies who invade their treasured New England home. Their teenage daughter, Lydia (Winona Ryder), has an obsession with death which allows her to see the deceased couple. Starring Alec Baldwin and Geena Davis, and featuring Michael Keaton as the title character, the film grossed $80 million on a relatively low budget and won the Academy Award for Best Makeup. It was later adapted into an animated TV series of the same name, with Burton playing a role as executive producer, that ran on ABC and later the Fox network.