Reigning Bats and Dogs : Tim Burton Rides High With ‘Batman’ Sequel, ‘Frankenweenie’

A life-size sculpture of the Penguin’s head rested on a table in an office at the Warner Bros. lot in Burbank. Scattered about the floor were an autographed photo of Vincent Price, an airbrushed illustration of Batgirl with her breasts exposed and a comic-book rendering of the Dark Knight swinging from a building. The last piece was signed by Batman creator Bob Kane: “For my friend Tim. ‘Bats’ of luck on ‘Batman II.’ ”

When Tim Burton entered the room in black boots and blazer, it was like a spider walking into his web of dark toys. “I don’t know where I get these things,” he said in a high-pitched voice, punctuated by cackles. “They just accumulate.”

The restive director was taking a rare break from editing “Batman Returns,” the summer sequel to the 1989 spectacular that cost an estimated $50 million to make and generated $406 million in theaters worldwide.

What pulled Burton out of the editing bay to talk, however, was a 1984 short film that cost less than $1 million to make and played in only a handful of theaters for five days before being locked away in a vault.

That artful 27-minute project, “Frankenweenie,” was the first film Burton directed while working as a young animator at Walt Disney Studios, not long after graduating from CalArts in Valencia.

The surreal fantasy about a boy who stitches up his dead bull terrier and jump-starts him with electricity is currently screening as a theatrical short with “Blame It on the Bellboy” at the El Capitan Theater in Hollywood. And thanks to the wonderful world of Walt Disney Home Video, “Frankenweenie” will be released on videocassette April 10 for $14.99.

Burton was 25 when he directed “Frankenweenie.” At 33, preparing what will probably be the biggest film of the year in “Batman Returns,” his career has already come full circle. He is by most accounts the most successful--at least financially--director in the world for his age, and now his early work is being tapped for video.

“I don’t quite know my own dynamic. I’m not wary, it’s just that I can’t believe it in a way because I’m so removed now,” Burton said when asked about the release of the black-and-white “Frankenweenie,” which contains many of the bold, neo-primitive visuals that he would later return to in his hit films “Beetlejuice” and “Edward Scissorhands.” And the spotted-eye dog in “Frankenweenie” bears a remarkable resemblance to the cartoon character Burton created for “The Family Dog,” the animated CBS series that’s scheduled to premiere next year.

“I’ve never been in a situation like this, where something that you did so long ago comes back, even though it wasn’t that long ago,” said Burton, dropping his words in clusters broken by awkward pauses. His hands never stopped moving, always searching for expression, occasionally tugging on the shock of black hair that ran wild on his head. “It’s a little rough, because it’s the first thing I did. But I do enjoy it, and I am proud of it. Very much.”

That was more than Burton had to say about his blockbuster “Batman.” Burton has always had a special connection to his films--whether as a child shooting with an 8-millimeter camera, building cardboard sets in the back yard and burning them down while his grandmother held the lights, or as a college student at CalArts producing his first short strip of animation. There, on a scholarship funded by Disney, he created a little horror piece involving a mad scientist, a monster and a dental patient.

“When I thought about the first ‘Batman,’ and I thought about the other films that I’ve worked on, I didn’t feel as close to ‘Batman’ as I did my other films. And yet I loved the material,” he said.

“You know what it is? That has to do with directing your first big movie. I mean, there’s something that’s just different than any other experience. It’s something you can’t prepare for. It’s an abstract experience, and until you go through it you don’t really know what that’s like.

“So I think about the first movie, and I liked parts of it. But parts of it are kind of boring to me. I don’t know--I don’t know.” He shakes his head and lets out an exasperated breath. “It’s OK. But I think it was much more a cultural phenomenon than a great movie.”

The original “Batman” made $150 million in video sales. Burton knows that Disney’s strategy is to release “Frankenweenie” so that it will be out in the video marketplace by June 19 when “Batman Returns” opens in theaters. As a visual artist who makes movies for the big screen, though, Burton appears to have a grudging tolerance for home video.

“It’s funny--video and laser disc and all these special-edition releases they do are really, really wonderful,” Burton said. “I just hope that in the end it doesn’t completely become that. It’s like movies seem to get more commercialized.”

That may sound cheeky coming from Burton, who has never directed less than a commercially successful motion picture, beginning with “Pee-wee’s Big Adventure” in 1985. But Burton appears to operate artistically from a more personal place. “It’s weird,” he said. “There’s always problems (in my movies). I’m not one of America’s greatest storytellers. I think if the things I’ve done have worked, they’ve worked on another level.”

The tales are well documented about Burton’s bizarre childhood, when he was tortured by nightmares, worshiped Vincent Price as his idol and played in a cemetery down the street. When Disney recruited Burton from Cal Arts in the early 1980s, it was the beginning of a strange and unlikely relationship.

Burton began as an assistant animator on “The Fox and the Hound,” but he couldn’t adapt very well to the Disney style. “In animation, especially there, it would take you five years to make a movie,” Burton said, referring to the old Disney regime before Chairman Michael Eisner took over, and before the recent revival of animation.

“And at the time, what they were putting out just wasn’t worth it,” he continued. “In animation, you’re supposed to be an artist, on one hand. But on the other hand, they didn’t want you to do a damn thing. They wanted you to be a zombie factory worker. And that’s just really hard, to make those two sides of the brain fit. And actually you get driven crazy, and that’s sort of what happened.”

So they moved the young Burton into a room by himself to create characters and drawings for “The Black Cauldron.”

“It turned into a weird lab experiment, because I spent almost a year in a room by myself, boards and boards and boards of drawings for ‘The Black Cauldron.’ It’s probably the most work I’ve ever done as an illustrator. And they’d come in every day and go, ‘Great, great, great,’ and then they’d leave.”

In the end, Disney never used any of Burton’s ideas for the movie. But still, executives wanted to quarry his unusual talent. So they fronted him money to make “Vincent” as an exploration into stop-motion animation. The arguably autobiographical five-minute short is about a morbid boy who fancies himself Vincent Price, envisioning his drab daily life as a dank, dark world filled with bats, spiders and zombie dogs. Burton even solicited Price to read the narrative poetry--written by Burton in the spirit of Edgar Allan Poe.

“Vincent” was shelved by Disney, too.

Then came “Frankenweenie.” Intended as a theatrical short, the film was shot on the Disney lot with Shelley Duvall and Daniel Stern playing the parents of Barret Oliver. The story is basically a skewed retelling of the 1931 classic “Frankenstein” starring Boris Karloff as the monster, which was one of Burton’s favorite childhood films.

“He even went out of his way to get the laboratory equipment (designed by Kenneth Strickfaden) used in the original ‘Frankenstein,’ ” recalled Duvall, who hired Burton after the shoot to direct an episode of her live-action “Faerie Tale Theatre” on Showtime. “It had been sitting up in an attic for years, gathering dust. He got the equipment and then added a few fanciful Burton touches, like a bicycle upside down and a toaster.”

“The idea originally for ‘Frankenweenie’ was to do what Disney used to do in the past,” Burton said. “Because animated films are not very long, they would have a nature short like ‘Charlie the Wacky Cougar’ accompany an animated film.”

The film that “Frankenweenie” was designed to accompany was the 1984 re-release of “Pinocchio.” But “Frankenweenie” was slapped with a PG rating by the Motion Picture Assn. of America. Disney released it for a few days in test theaters and then pulled it back, saying simply that it was “ahead of its time.” Nonetheless, “Frankenweenie” was the calling card that landed Burton his first studio film, “Pee-wee.”

“The PG rating kind of flipped me out,” said Burton, who is working on a new animated film for Disney called “Nightmare Before Christmas,” about a skeletal figure who wants to partake in the holiday spirit. “We appealed it and said, ‘We want a G, what can we do?’ They couldn’t tell us. They basically said, ‘Well, it’s just the tone .’ For us it was frustrating, because it was something we cared about.”

Burton, readying himself to head out to the editing studio to get back to work on “Batman Returns,” said that he is once again working on something that he cares about. Highly sought after following the release of “Batman,” he ended months of speculation when he finally decided to do “Batman Returns.” He did so, he said, because he believes he can bring a freshness to the material.

“Having gone through a big movie experience now, I was just more in tune with (‘Batman Returns’), and more there, in a way,” Burton said. “And also, I tried not to think about, you know, here you’re doing something based on something else. See, that didn’t interest me. I wanted to make the movie feel fresh for myself. I wanted to be true to what I thought the spirit of ‘Batman’ was, but then not just feel that I was treading over exactly the same territory.”

Burton freely admits that what attracted him to “Batman” in the first place was that the characters are all mental meltdowns--most millionaires, after all, don’t dress up as bats to rid their city of crime. This time around, Burton has two more twisted characters to play with: Danny DeVito as the Penguin and Michelle Pfeiffer as Catwoman.

“They’re new characters that I like, and in a weird way want to have more fun with,” Burton said. “I see these characters less as comic books and more as myth and fairy-tale symbols.

“I just feel good about (‘Batman Returns’). I mean, it’s dangerous because I’ve never done something based on something else I’ve done. And that’s a real danger. It’s a danger because of expectations, and just scale, and how a project like that is perceived--and it’s completely the opposite of why I did it and perhaps what it will turn out like.”