Tim Burton exhibit in Toronto

[Velvet]

From Federico Fellini to Terry Gilliam, it’s a given that cartoonists often make the most visually adventurous live-action filmmakers. It’s not surprising, then, that Tim Burton’s roots are firmly planted in the sketchpad. The creator both of stunningly original “live†movies like the modern classic Edward Scissorhands and of animated delights like Corpse Bride, Burton came to the cinema via art school and got his start as a misfit animator for Disney.

The 52-year-old director has never stopped drawing and designing, and the fruits of his visual imagination are on abundant display in Tim Burton, the exhibition and film retrospective opening at Toronto’s Bell Lightbox on Friday. Presented by the Toronto International Film Festival and running through April of next year, the show tracks Burton’s career from the six-minute stop-motion short Vincent of 1982 to this year’s blockbuster Alice in Wonderland, using the drawings, maquettes, puppets and other visual material he created for his movies.

Also included are souvenirs from the productions themselves — Catwoman’s provocative costume in Batman Returns, Sweeney Todd’s array of cutthroat razors — and juvenilia from Burton’s days as a dreamy, inarticulate kid growing up in Burbank, Calif.

Tim Burton originated at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, where it premiered in 2009 and was a box-office smash. TIFF is putting its own stamp on the exhibition by having Burton design a Lightbox display window as part of the Canadian debut, and by offering a complementary film program that pairs Burton’s work with cinema classics and offers a two-day marathon screening of his complete feature-film oeuvre.

Burton himself was on hand Monday to discuss the show during a Lightbox news conference. Affable and typically dishevelled, his hair as rumpled as the brown sweater under his pinstripe blazer, he admitted that seeing his preparatory artwork and youthful doodlings in an exhibition was a strange sensation.

“I never really went to museums — wax museums, maybe — so it was an out-of-body experience,†he said. “It was like, ‘Oh, there’re my dirty socks hanging on the wall.’â€

He says MoMA curators Ron Magliozzi and Jenny He sifted through drawers and boxes of stuff that Burton, a self-described “slob,†had left untouched over the years.

“Ron and Jenny found all kinds of things. I’m mean, I never knew I had so many rejection slips.â€

A typewritten "No thank-you" response from the Disney people, alongside one of Burton’s humble handwritten submission letters, are among the more touching items on display. He did finally land a coveted job at the studio, only to have his work continually vetoed.

“I felt like the princess in the castle,†he said. “I was treated nicely but I was still locked up in the tower.â€

The exhibition has exhumed one of his few green-lit projects from that period, an Asian-flavoured TV version of Hansel and Gretel that was broadcast exactly once, on the Disney Channel, in 1983. It screens in the exhibition, along with webisodes of his lesser-known 2000 internet series, The World of Stain Boy.

Read more: http://www.cbc.ca/arts/artdesign/story/2010/11/22/tim-burton-exhibition.html#ixzz16GtgHqio

[Davey Boy 2.0]

He was on Stroumbo the other night- quirky, interesting guy also pretty down to earth