Planet Tim Burton lands in Flanders: 'A pressure cooker full of bizarre and disruptive ideas'

The Flemish waffle baker at the Willy Wonka Wafl Factory in the Burton Cafe has seen all the Tim Burton films, he says from between a sleek hipster beard. 'Especially since you had to prepare the menu,' I say. The menu at the - temporary - Burton Cafe in exhibition space C-min includes: Charlie Chocolate Wafl, Scissorhands Wafl, Oompa Loopa Wafl, Beetlejuice flavour waters, Mr Bloom Tostado and other Burton Lane Cinema Snacks. 'No,' says the waffle baker. 'I was already a fan.' We agree it's easy pickings from the fairytale oeuvre of Tim Burton, one of the most influential filmmakers of recent decades.

Lugubrious environment

From 15 August, the international, touring exhibition The World of Tim Burton will be in its full glory in a lurid, Burton-like setting: the heritage site C-mine in Genk, Belgium. Sandwiched between the shaft trestles and haulers of a former coal mine, lots of gritty black against ominous skies - totally Burton's biotope. New to Benelux only, The World of Tim Burton. The exhibition was previously shown in New York (at MoMa, the third most visited at the time with more than 810,500 visitors), Paris, Tokyo, São Paulo and Prague. Tim Burton is coming to Genk in person at the end of September.

Napkin Art

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The first new word we learn at the The World of Tim Burton preview is napkin art. In other words, the napkins Burton drew on all his life. Everywhere and always. Because: 'Drawing is sport for my brain.' In total, the exhibition features 650 (partly new) works from Burton's personal archive, amounting to a whirlwind of drawings, paintings, photographs, animated stop-motion puppets, models, films and sculptural installations.

Tim Burton is the elusive guy everyone has been in class with, if you were lucky. Tricky. Pressing. Funny. Super-creative scatterbrain. Fluffy budding intellectual, with his haircut like an electrocuted city rat (free after Joost Zwagerman). A pressure cooker full of bizarre and disruptive ideas. Pain in the ass from teachers.

According to Tim Burton, at least one teacher said to him: 'You'll never amount to anything.' That was a good 50-percent guess, because such a gifted chaotic person often becomes a failure or a phenomenon.

Tim Burton became the latter.

Mars Attacks

Further anecdotal information about Burton's childhood is plentifully filled in during interviews by the maestro himself. He loved horror films as a boy (but what teenager doesn't?). He decapitated dolls, pulled off the limbs and mutilated them - as almost all the dolls in his films are deformed. And he enjoyed nothing more than scaring his classmates about ghosts and aliens, which he later continued in freakish films like Mars Attacks.

Gamechanger Burton: Mars Attacks came out at about the same time as the obligatory Independent Day. The latter was the big blockbuster. The former scored decently but did change the rules of the disaster film. Henceforth, more irony and more gothic geekiness. Burton set the tone.

Walt Disney

In The World of..., by looking at the illustrations, notebooks and notebooks, daubed hotel stationery and restaurant napkins, you get a little grip on Burton's creative process and the inspiration for his films. In any case, that did not lie with Walt Disney. Tim Burton worked at Disney for five years after studying animation at the California Institute of the Arts. There, they had the man of sweet horror & horror drawing "keischattige" (dixit our Flemish guide at C-Mine) Disney characters. Because Burton wanted to do his own drawing in addition to his duty assignments, he only got two hours of sleep a day. Burton: 'I learned to sleep during the day over my Disney work, while everyone thought I was thinking and drawing.'

After a few years - Disney did recognise his great talent - Burton was given a free assignment by Disney. He was given complete freedom to invent characters. Burton drew a total of 600 figures and puppets. Disney never used any of them. A selection of them hangs at the exhibition. The short cartoon Burton made, Vincent, remained on the shelf at Disney. Scenes about reanimating dead house doors (Burton was and is a Frankenstein-adept) Disney deemed unsuitable for delicate children's souls. Burton left. 'I felt like a confined princess at Disney. They always treated me extremely well, though.'

Nightmare

On the hottest night of August, in preparation for the exhibition, I watched Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas again (N.B. Burton was the producer this time, he didn't have time to direct). That's a stop-motion film in which character Jack Skellington, Pumpkin King and Halloween specialist, wants to transform himself into lovable Father Christmas, with masterful singing and music by Danny Elfman, pretty much Burton's in-house composer. Fitting homework because 80 per cent of the motifs in Nightmare are found in other Burton films and on The World of Tim Burton.

What stands out in the exhibition? First of all, the 'stitches', the stitches. Almost all the characters have stitches or scars. Sally, the other protagonist in The Nightmare, is a rag doll sewn together. She even sews herself back together in the film when her evil lover cuts off her leg. No doll or head without stitching, painting and pasting work by Burton. The drawings are preliminary studies of the films. Whether it is Edward Scissorhands, Sally, The Penguin or The Joker, all characters carry an injury on their bodies as a life secret. This is also why Burton found his 'Joker' a lot more interesting than the one-dimensional Batman himself. 'Isn't Batman a bit lacking in it?" asked worried producers midway through production. That wasn't the point, Burton thought. Losers like Joker or Penguin are much more interesting.

Suburbia

Burton's characters are pale, lonely and misunderstood 'misfits'. Enlargements or alter egos of the young Tim Burton from suburb Burbank, where he grew up. Tim Burton likes to show painfully raked towns with fluorescent green lawns and toxic orange roofs in his films, as in Edward Scissorhands and Big Fish. Burton's Ed Wood is about the worst director of all time, who, despite disapproval and booing, continuously and stubbornly keeps making his own film.

Burton's napkins feature lots of teeth. Rows of sharp teeth in the long jaws of wolves, dogs, The Penguin or Jack Skellington. A Burton trauma: his father had two false fangs. Very sharp ones, which he moved on demand, much to little Tim's hilarity. Who said about this later: 'That was the only warm memory of him.' In jest, but still. Tim himself used to have braces. Well, the big Tim knew how to deal with braces later in his films.

Big eyes

Eyes are the main motif. Eyes are a source of expression for Tim Burton. He even made a separate film about them: Big Eyes. About Margaret Ulbrich, the woman who painted hundreds of paintings of children with big eyes in the 1950s. These hung above the sofa in the livings of the suburbs where Burton grew up. To the suburban population, that was "art", another childhood trauma of Burton's. Burton's napkin and bonnet art is stiff with big-eyed dolls with one dot in the middle. Lots of big-eyed girls, funny and gruesome at the same time.

Tim Burton's The World features cartoons with text from his many books. Burton was not a great but powerful and persistent cartoonist. Staring girl at the sky. Gazing girl at the floor. Gazing girl resting her eyes, literally of course, in a pond. Drawings with eyes, endlessly many, endlessly original, sometimes endlessly corny.

'Man, undressing women with his eyes.' 'Blind man with permanent seeing eye dogs.'

Michael Keaton

Eyes was also a reason for Tim Burton to choose actor Michael Keaton for the role of Batman. Keaton is a small, very funny actor, but not afflicted with actorly beauty or a Michelangelo body. He does, however, have expressive eyes. For the role of Batman ('Badman' the Flemish guides invariably say) he is perfectly suited: a Batman with mask on is nothing more than a human bat with striking eyes. Jack Skellington (Burton's favourite character) from The Nigtmare has no eyes, just hollow peepholes. What a delightful paradox: the denial of eyes is the confirmation of the great importance of eyes. With Burton, nothing goes normally.

Burton's Burtonesque world is forgiven with spirals and black-and-white stripes. And balloons. Balloons with lapidary stripes, stitches and big eyes. The exhibition features the large blue-and-white balloon Burton made for the opening exhibition at MoMa. A balloon is very Burton: it is everything and it is nothing. If you let the air out, the character shrivels up to insubstantiality.

Warhead

Finally, the hairstyle. The dolls in the drawings have hairstyles as if they were under electricity. Edward Scissorshand's hairdo is modelled on Burton's own favourite coup. Leonardo da Vinci warned five centuries ago that every painter is in fact painting himself. Figures often resemble their masters. Leonardo da Vinci thought this very natural. Burton has worn a creative warhead with dark hair all around since childhood. He is always dressed in black, light gothic style.

Things are looking up with Disney. Burton is doing the reworking of the classic 'Dumbo' for Disney, spring 2019 in cinemas. At the end of September, master Tim Burton himself is coming to Genk. He will attend the opening of the Tim Burton Film Festival at Euroscoop, which is part of the C-mine site. He will sign his thick art book The Art of Tim Burton (1,000 illustrations, 434 pages) and do Q&As with press and students.

One Flemish journalist is already looking forward to Burton's coming: 'I hope he will sign on beer mats with us, I will stay close by.'

With thanks to Tristan Theirlynck, UvA.

Good to know

The World of Tim Burton C-mine Genk, Belgium,
Evence Coppéelaan 91. 15.08.2018 to 28.11.2018Tuesday-Sunday,10am-6pm. Admission €15. See further www.c-mine.be Euroscoop Genk, euroscoop.be/genk