Scene by Scene
The film opens as the camera follows a cat into an empty room where Vincent plays on his recorder a mournful version of "The Hoochie Kootchy Dance"--known to millions of children in its bastardized version by its opening line "Oh they don't wear pants in the southern part of France." Vincent Price, in voiceover, announces that this young boy is "considerate and nice, But he wants to be just like Vincent Price," cueing the first transformation of the innocent boy to a mustachioed, hollow eyed, sophisticate complete with smoking jacket and cigarette holder. The boy, now posing as Price, exits the room with nose held high, cigarette dangling with disdain.

The film match cuts as "Price" crosses the threshold of the door, maintaining spatial continuity--but in the incoming shot, Vincent has returned to his normal self. In voiceover, the couplet

He doesn't mind living with his sister, dog and cats,
Though he'd rather share a home with spiders and bats.

quickly cues another transformation back to Price. In this instance the film match cuts from a shot of Vincent, touching a light switch, to a dark, dungeon-like space where "Vincent-as-Price-as-Mad-Scientist" stands in a gothic pool of light clutching a pull chain for an overhead light. Overlaying the 3D character and set, a group of cel animated bats flutter from the foreground, masking the cut. A minor key organ theme highlights the light/dark juxtaposition, while an unadorned checkerboard pattern on the back wall calls to mind UPA's stylish use of simplified 2D background drawings. The camera tracks with Vincent as he exits right, and a black foreground mask with abstract shaped holes comes into view, eventually blacking out the scene. This foreground masking is one of the more blatant combinations of 2D and 3D animation within the film.

The next shot begins with the mask opening as set of hinged jaws which reveal the "mad scientist," against the same unadorned checkerboard background and surrounded by horrific objects, turning the crank on a jack-in-the-box. As the music box plays "Pop Goes the Weasel," shrunken heads spring from the mouth of a snake. (This snake form is one Burton clearly enjoys, as he brings it back in Beetlejuice and Nightmare Before Christmas.) Vincent wanders "dark hallways alone and tormented," he leans against a woman's torso. (All of the adults in the film are presented as faceless, figures whose faces extend beyond the frame.) A cut on position brings the film back from his "dark hallways" to high key reality, returning Vincent to a regular kid, leaning against his aunt, who pats him on the head. Price continues in voice over:

Vincent is nice when his aunt comes to see him,
But imagines dipping her in wax for his wax museum.

He likes to experiment on his dog Abacrombie,
In the hopes of creating a horrible zombie.

So he and his horrible zombie dog,
Could go searching for victims in the London fog.

The spatial transformations continue as before, but here the cartoonish gloom descends when the "dark" Vincent, clad in Edwardian lab coat and gloves, imagines hoisting his aunt into a vat of boiling wax and performing Frankenstein-like experiments on his dog. The filmic space becomes more expressionistic as the diminutive Vincent searches for "victims in the London fog" in a technically sophisticated long shot that combines stark silhouettes of distorted stairways, shafts of light piercing through skylights, and billowing fog.