Nick Arceneaux-The World of Tim Burton

The World of Time Burton was a course that taught me many things about Tim Burton the man, Tim Burton the poet, and Tim Burton the storyteller. In life any good quality comes from experience. The fact that Tim Burton does what he does so well only adheres to the fact that he has been through what most people would call an interesting life. I find inspiration in reading Gothic Fantasy because I know that Burton had a dream and he chased it and it became reality. What have I really learned through this course though? I view this course less of a rigorous class and more of a reflective class because Burton shares the same feelings and emotions on screen that we feel inside ourselves. The true magic of watching one of his movies is being able to relate to the character on screen even though it may be in a fairytale. I like to think of human emotions being subconsciously ingrained into the human psyche for millennia. We share the same fears, beliefs, and morals that our ancestors had. How clever is it to pick up on that knowledge and to use it to your advantage. But I don't ever think that it was Burton's plan to get famous or rich. I think Burton just wanted to live a happy life while pursuing a career in animation. Of course genius will never go unnoticed though. For a man with such a childhood as his I would have expected less to come of his life but I think that is the beauty of it all. That is what makes him so inspirational is that he came from relatively nothing except his talent and imagination and he made something out of a bland and boring life. I think in that sense Burton really lives out the saying "there is beauty in the dark." His life can also show what a killer suburban life is to the malleable minds of children. It's like being put in a gray corner, neither here nor there. In between the city and the country, in between both extremes, the black and the white. Suburbia is limbo for creativity. One can go as far as to say suburbia kills creativity, and it does. Burton beat the odds though, he made it out of suburbia alive and still has some (albeit some) of his sanity left. He is the hero of a generation of emotionally charged teenagers and abandoned rejects alike. He is the Jesus of suburbia (stole that line from Green Day.) Seriously though, he is a little bit of a savior for the kids who have horrible lives. Burton can make you laugh, he can make you wince, he can even make you cry. But why does anything make you feel a certain way? It is because you can relate to that creature on the screen. If you can relate your audience to a character on a screen then you are giving the viewer a peephole into your mind. And if Burton's films are any indication of what his mind is like, then he must be living in beautiful insanity.