Suarez- The World of Tim Burton

When I began this course, I was but a mere infant to the world of Tim Burton, but this has changed in my 14 weeks spent in this class. Prior to this class, all I knew about Tim Burton was that he made movies I enjoyed, and that he loves Johnny Depp. I had no idea his past was so struggled filled, that he published a poetry book; I really just had no idea he did anything besides movies with Johnny Depp. Without this course I would have never known that in every Burton film are aspects of the struggles he felt he had to overcome. I can now watch any Tim Burton movie and relate it back to his life is some way or another. I did not just learn about Tim Burton though, I also learned about new ways to analyze films; I learned to not just watch it for the plot, but to think of other aspects that influence the characters and themes, such as political and social. I had never heard of a mise-en-scene analysis until this course, but now I know what it is, and the importance it holds. Some other interesting information I learned about film making—that also relate to mise-en-scene analysis—are the types of ways to describe a scene; the proper terms used to describe lighting, camera angle, the most important object in a scene, the colors, etc. I already knew that the world is a terrible place at times, but a lot of things I learned in this class just reinforced this phenomenon. I found the denial of death to be one of the most interesting topics we discussed all semester. Because I have lost people close to me, including my mom and my grandfather, death was something I unfortunately was very familiar with. Prior to this class, I had never really thought in depth about the way Americans think of death in comparison with the rest of the world; I have never really thought about death as not a bad thing. My overall ideas about death haven’t changed, but I definitely feel as though some of my thoughts were challenged. I liked all of the films we watched in class; almost all of them were films I had seen before entering this course, some were even films I didn’t know were directed by Tim Burton. The picture I chose for this blog is a picture from my favorite Tim Burton movie, Big Fish. This picture is from one of the very last scenes in the movie where Will Bloom is describing to his father, Edward Bloom, the way in which he is going to pass away. This scene always makes me cry because of how it represents two rivaling personalities coming together as one. Having lost my mom at 13 years of age—a relatively young age—I feel as though I never got to know her as well I would have liked, which is some ways is linked to how Will Bloom feels about his father. I didn’t have a bad relationship with my mom, but we did butt heads a lot because school and grades, and it wasn’t until a few months before she passed that we really began to get along well, and she began to really appreciate the young women I was turning into. To me, this scene is Will finally accepting his father for who he has and will always be, and it is at the end of his life, which is parallel to how things were with my mom. This scene means a lot to me, and that is why I chose this picture.