O'Doherty - Howlin at the Moon

In the movie Big Fish, Tim Burton takes Edward Bloom, a very optimistic character and throws him into several situations in which he encounters dark, grotesque characters. One of the characters he encounters is Karl the Giant. Karl suffers from Marfan syndrome (which is the same condition that Abraham Lincoln had) which explains why he is unusually tall. When all the townspeople thought that Karl was a monster, Bloom volunteered to get rid of him. When he met Karl, Bloom introduced himself as a human sacrifice, but when Karl refused to eat him, Bloom realized that he was not a monster, he was just a regular person who was simply misunderstood. Another character that is strange and rather dark is Amos Carroway. Amos is the owner of the circus. Although he was a bit odd when Bloom was first introduced to him, Amos only got stranger and more grotesque as the story progressed. In fact, he turned out to be a werewolf. One more character that is rather grotesque is the witch. When Bloom was a young boy, he and his friends went exploring. Bloom was dared to knock on her door and retrieve the eye that was said to show people the way they would die. Bloom accepted the challenge, brought the witch back to his friends, looked into the eye himself, and graciously thanked her for her time. While other people shun these three characters for being strange and scary looking, Bloom befriends them. His sheer optimism allows him to see the good in everyone-- regardless of how scary they appear to be. Although these characters were probably not mythical creatures, Bloom believed them to be so. His optimism and imagination allowed him to take a person's insecurities and flaws and turn it into something cool and fairytale like! And this was the way he lived his life. Whatever went on inside his mind was real to him-- so real that he believed whole-heartedly that everything he said was true. With that said, there was no real difference between fantasy and reality or facts and fiction. He became the stories he told and therefore he continued to live even after he died. I believe that the character of Edward Bloom was inspired by Burton's own father, who used to entertain himself by scaring the neighborhood kids by taking out his dentures and howling at the moon like a werewolf.