Eljumaily-Big Fish

Tim Burton’s film Big Fish takes main character Edward Bloom, a mortal man, and makes his life incredibly fantastical. Burton flawlessly takes the sunny Bloom and throws him into many dark, grotesque situations with odd, nearly mythical characters. These characters seem to have a certain connection with Bloom and likewise he is constantly drawn to the strange and unusual. The many similarities that the movie plot has with Burton’s completely normal/fantastical life are striking. Burton has the ability to fully understand what it takes to take such a strange, dark past and make it larger than life.

            The first scene that truly shows how Edward embraces darkness involves his childhood friends and the Witch. All the other children are too afraid to go up to the Witch’s door and find out if she is real or not, while Bloom approaches it just like another normal household. Burton would show the same familiarity to the dark, boarded house because of his own childhood jail cell of a room. When the Witch shows the children how they will die, Edward takes in the scene with a look of curiousness on his face. He is okay with it, just as Burton finds the same comfort in very dark things.

            Another scene where Edward takes the strangest of situations and makes good of it would be when he takes on Karl the giant in front of the giant’s cave. He sarcastically tells the giant to eat him, then gives Karl comfort and tells him they should run away together. Everyone in the town fears Karl as if he is a monster, but within minutes Edward makes friends with the monster and runs away with him. He starts his story off with a bang, having the star of the town begin his travels with a companion so feared by those same people.

            All of these strange events that Bloom exaggerates immensely in his own head and through his stories are very similar to how Burton saw his life as a child. When his father would scare the other children with his Were-wolf act gave him the fantasy in his head that he needed. To him, his father was a fairy-tale creature that contributed to young Tim’s imaginative mind. Edward might not have done or experienced completely all the things he spoke of, but he remember them and took them in in ways that made him larger than life and almost mythical.

            Burton ceaselessly takes the strange and unusual and couples it with the sunny and bright. The fact that Edward’s last name is Bloom already sets him up for being a character full of life and happiness. That Mr. Bloom takes in all these different grotesque events and makes them beautifully contrasting stories was a perfect trait for Burton to build his work Big Fish on. It’s Tim’s optimistic side, where he takes many of the strange occurrences he had and makes them beautiful through a normal man much like himself. Overall, Big Fish is a wonderful display of how the disgusting can be made beautiful through your own mind.