The film's binary opposition of Vincent's normal childhood and Vincent's darker obsessions proceeds:

While other kids read books like Go Jane Go,
Vincent's favorite author is Edgar Allen Poe.

Vincent, under the spell of Poe, imagines that his beautiful wife has been buried alive, a reference to Poe's "Fall of the House of Usher."

Burton continues his spoof of B horror films by staging the boy's "tragedy" in a series of grandiose, melodramatic gestures underscored by frightful organ music. Simple sets, cut by expressionistic shafts of lights, give free reign to Vincent's melodramatic actions, as he plays the romantic artist, stricken with grief. Vincent digs frantically to uncover his wife's "grave," unaware that he's destroying his mother's flower bed. Burton again toys with the film's spatial and temporal continuity using a simple light cue to transform Vincent's nighttime "graveyard" to daytime "flower bed," while the boy maintains the continuous action of digging. His mother enters, admonishing the boy, who pokes his head sheepishly from the hole in close-up. Banished to his room, the film reverts to 2D animation to depict a silhouette of a small Vincent ascending a massive, misshapen staircase.

Alone in his "tower of doom," Vincent's romanticized hallucinations become more kinetic and distorted. His mother bursts into his room and tries to get him to give up his morbid fantasies and "get outside and have some real fun." As Vincent's "horrid insanity" peaks melodramatically, lightning flashes and his visions literally begin to swirl around him in an animated version of a Hollywood montage. As the checkerboard walls sway and bend, Burton animates a series of relief sculptures of skeleton hands, his "dead wife" and his dog Abacrombie in limbo light and supers them over a swooning Vincent, a montage of spatial representation systems which interact on a number of levels.

First, the sculptures of the wife and Abacrombie are iconographic forms but rendered in rounded relief, a design in which the outline of the object melds with a sense of dimensionality. Second, by superimposing and moving these forms towards the camera in an alternating pattern--frame left then frame right--Burton suggests specters in a manner that has been well codified in B-horror movies. This particular method of staging relief sculptures represents a significant visual technique for Burton, who used virtually used the same approach in Beetlejuice, Edward Scissorhands and Nightmare Before Christmas.

The larger montage, which calls to mind many of the elaborate sequences constructed by Slavko Vorkapich in the 1930s, also combines a close-up of lightning flashes on the 3D Vincent in the foreground against a warping 2D checkerboard background, and a shot of Vincent spinning in the center of the screen. The interplay of these systems for articulating screen space is the result of a strong design sense applied to the difficulties of combining 2D and 3D animation. Given Disney's overwhelming commitment to the cel animation, melding these techniques is perhaps indicative of Burton's own struggle to pursue his own vision.