Burton said that,Burton said that,

Disney seemed to be pleased with [Vincent], but at the same time kind of ashamed. I just think they didn't know what to do with it. . . It's like "Gee, what shall we worry about today, this five-minute animated short film or our $30 million dollar movie?" . . it didn't rate really high on their priority scale. Plus, I didn't even know whether I was an employee then.

Pastiche is a melding of styles that encourages the reader to mark similarity between the text at hand and the original work[s]. Burton's use of pastiche is perhaps simply the easy result of an immature, struggling artist, who finds imitation easier than finding his own voice. But building Vincent's larger framework after a Dr. Seuss book seems key for Burton: on first viewing, one has the overwhelming sense of the familiar Seuss style, the same rhythms and rhymes. This strategy seems a conscious attempt to use that familiar to and structure to establish a childlike, storybook world. Once this world is established, his use of pastiche allows Vincent to click in and out of a darker mold that mixes Poe, Vincent Price films and expressionism, to adopt the darker style of those works for tongue-in-cheek humor. For Burton, using pastiche here may have been a strategy of convenience, particularly in the short animated form where extensive characterization and mood development are limited. However, along with other signature traits like interest in fairy tales, graveyards and gadgetry, a passion for themes of duality and the intolerance of suburbia, the use of pastiche ultimately became a hallmark of the Burton oeuvre, for it recurs as a increasingly sophisticated tool for mirroring other texts in virtually every subsequent film, from Pee Wee's Big Adventure to Ed Wood.

Michael Frierson teaches film production and theory at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. With his wife Martha Garrett, he has produced short clay animations for the Children's Television Workshop and Nickelodeon. His book Clay Animation: American Highlights 1908 to the Present won the 1995 McLaren-Lambart Book Award for Animation Scholarship. Currently, he is completing a documentary on the life and work of New Orleans photographer Clarence John Laughlin.

Vincent by Tim Burton. © Walt Disney.

Production Credits for 'Vincent' (1982)

Distributed by Buena Vista Distributing Company
Walt Disney Productions Present
A Film by Tim Burton and Rick Heinrichs
Narrated by Vincent Price
Written, Designed and Directed by Tim Burton
Produced by Rick Heinrichs
Technical Director: Stephan Chiodo
Director of Photography: Victor Abdalov
Music: Ken Hinton
Sculpture and Additional Design: Rick Heinrichs
Animation: Stephen Chiodo
With Gratitude to: Julie Hickson, Chris Roth, Dave Allen, Eric Brevig, Chas Smith, New Hollywood, Inc.