The film is also an early stylistic benchmark for Burton, whose collaboration with Heinrichs established a pattern of combining 2D and 3D animation within a single film. Heinrichs, who has since collaborated with Burton as associate producer (Frankenweenine) and production designer (Edward Scissorhands, Nightmare Before Christmas), argues that Vincent was a breakthrough project "that taught Tim and me that you can combine the really graphic look of a two-dimensional picture with something that works in three dimensions." The melding of these two modes of animation is found throughout the film, and endures as a stylistic signature in Burton's later work. Heinrichs says that this notion of combining dimensional and flat animation was suggested by the three-dimensional models that Disney used to provide its animators as reference material.

The film's combination of 2D and 3D methods is foregrounded by its use of black and white. Without the use of color to establish spatial separation and define areas of screen space, the combination of 2D and 3D spatial representations is distilled and clarified. Black and white also reinforces the binary juxtapositions throughout the film: Burton effectively opposes light or high key scenes for Vincent's normal childhood with dark or low key scenes for his imagined torments.

Psychic Touchstone
The film is a tongue-in-cheek melodrama, a cartoonish pastiche of B-horror movie motifs and Vincent's angst, his exaggerated movements and chiseled facial expressions played against the mellifluous voice of Vincent Price, dripping with mock tragedy. Using Price for the voiceover cements Burton's pastiche of the literary and the cinematic. Poe/Price is Vincent/Burton's psychic touchstone. Burton, who thrived on monster movies as a child but asserts he "never read," frequently invokes Poe/Price as a key figure of his own childhood.

[T]he films of Vincent Price. . .spoke to me specifically for some reason. Growing up in suburbia, in an atmosphere that was perceived as nice and normal (but which I had other feelings about), those movies were a way to certain feelings, and I related them to the place I was growing up in. I think that's why I related so much to Edgar Allen Poe. I remember when I was younger, I had these two windows in my room, nice windows that looked out on to the lawn, and for some reason my parents walled them up and gave me this little slit window that I had to climb up on a desk to see out of. To this day I've never asked them why; I should ask them. So I likened it to that Poe story where the person was walled in and buried alive ["The Cask of Amontillado"]. Those were my forms of connection to the world around me. It's a mysterious place Burbank.

Vincent Price was somebody I could identify with. When you're younger things look bigger, you find your own mythology, you find what psychologically connects to you. And those movies, just the poetry of them, and this larger-than-life character who goes through a lot of torment--mostly imagined--just spoke to me in the way Gary Cooper or John Wayne might have to somebody else.

Throughout the film, Burton mainly uses match cutting to visualize Vincent's identification with Vincent Price, which provides a series of trick transitions between Vincent-as-himself and Vincent-as-Vincent Price. Each of these cuts appear temporally continuous, but as Vincent transforms between himself and Price, the filmic space fluctuates between spatial continuity and discontinuity. In Burton's words, "the film just goes in and out of Vincent's own reality. . .It clicks in and out of reality so to speak." This style of cutting is familiar from UPA cartoons, which often matched character position while backgrounds dissolved from one location to the next. Moreover, Vincent's flat, simplified backgrounds show the influence of the stylized spaces of such UPA films as Gerald McBoing Boing. Designer Bill Hurtz once described that cartoon as a film "without walls. There are no lines defining the difference between a ceiling and a wall. . . . The props were placed relative to the action; we thought of them as standing characters." Though Vincent is less sparse, a similar ambiguity is introduced when checkerboard linoleum appears as a stark wall instead of a floor, or skylights are simply placed in an upper area of the frame. Done in stop motion animation, Vincent nevertheless looks surprisingly similar to a UPA cartoon in the simplicity of its stylized design.