An Early Benchmark
After leaving the California Institute of the Arts in 1979, Burton went to work as an apprentice animator at Disney. Here, he came face to face with the reality of working in the animation industry. He recalled being "strapped to a table all day, and you have to draw. I just flipped out." Working with animator Glen Keane on The Fox and Hound (1979), he realized his visual sense was different from the Disney norm; he "couldn't even fake the Disney style." His then developed character sketches for The Black Cauldron (1980), none of which were used.

Vincent by Tim Burton. © Walt Disney.

Feeling out of place and ready to leave, Burton was given the opportunity to direct Vincent, a six minute short based on a children's story he had written. The film is a humorous look at a suburban boy named Vincent who reads Edgar Allen Poe and identifies with horror film star Vincent Price. The studio gave Burton the go ahead after Price read the story and agreed to do the voiceover.

Price said later that the film "was the most gratifying thing that ever happened. It was immortality--better than a star on Hollywood Boulevard" Though critics found similarities between Vincent and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Burton says the film "just happens to be shot in black and white, and there's a Vincent Price/Gothic kind of thing that makes it feel that way. . . . I think it probably has more to do with being inspired by Dr. Seuss. . . .The rhythm of his stuff spoke to me very clearly. Dr. Seuss's books were perfect: right number of words, the right rhythm, great subversive stories." Burton paid homage to Dr. Seuss by writing his story in rhyming couplets. These couplets juxtapose a set of binary oppositions between the melodramatic imaginings of Vincent and the reality of his boyhood existence.

Vincent by Tim Burton© Walt Disney.

Vincent visualizes his nightmarish fantasies: his aunt dipped in wax, his beautiful wife buried alive, and his dog Abacrombie transformed into a horrible zombie. But at every turn he is reminded by his mother that, "You're not Vincent Price, you're Vincent Malloy. You're not tormented, you're just a young boy." The film ends with a tongue-in-cheek citation of Poe's "The Raven": "And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor, Shall be lifted . . . Nevermore!" Thus, in a humorous way, the boy Vincent shares with the protagonist of the poem--the student trying to forget his lost Lenore--what Poe himself described as the "human thirst for self torture . . the luxury of sorrow," as he melodramatically indulges his dark fantasies. Vincent is for Burton the same sort of indulgence, a chance to represent himself on the screen as the tortured boy/outsider/artist. He characterizes Vincent as an artist by associating him with both the easel and the quill pen. Isolated and misunderstood in the grand tradition of the romantic artist, Vincent engages the darker side of life via the screen personae of Vincent Price, a figure associated with Poe through his roles in Roger Corman's Poe films of the 1960s.