“Every Tim Burton Movie” gets the Honest Trailers treatment, in honor of the director’s live-action Dumbo remake hitting theaters this week. In the 40 or so years since his days as an artist/animator at Disney in the early 1980s, Burton has gone on to become a filmmaker with a very distinct visual style and set of interests. Be it Beetlejuice, Batman, Edward Scissorhands, Big Fish, Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, or Big Eyes, one pretty much always knows when they’re watching a Burton film… for better or worse (more on that later).
That’s continued to be the case in recent years, even as Burton has focused more and more on re-imagining stories and established brands than exploring original material. Case in point: his latest project is Dumbo, a live-action/CGI retelling of Disney’s classic animated feature about a young elephant whose giant ears allow him to fly. it’s the newest addition to a long, long list of Burton movies about protagonists who are ostracized because of their looks and/or abilities, as Screen Junkies notes in a new video.
With Dumbo set to open in theaters on Thursday evening, March 28, Screen Junkies has decided to release an Honest Trailer that riffs on “every” Burton movie in one go. You can check it out in the space below.
As this video points out, there are a lot of elements that show up in Burton’s work again and again (and again), ranging from skeletons and clothing with black-and-white stripes to witches, suburbia, and Johnny Depp lathered in pale facial makeup. Arguably, this is a big part of the reason why so many of Burton’s movies from the 2000s and 2010s especially have struggled to leave a lasting impression on audiences, all talk of box office success aside. While films like Beetlejuice were visually innovative and tonally unique when they hit theaters, the director’s output has started to blur together in more recent years. It doesn’t help when Burton’s style comes across as a mismatch for the subject matter either, as many felt was the case on movies like his Planet of the Apes, Alice in Wonderland, and Dark Shadows (something the Honest Trailer pokes fun at).
At the same time, there’s no denying that Burton’s created some ground-breaking films that’ve meant a lot to people over the years. Moreover, as this Honest Trailer points out, he’s played a pivotal role in keeping stop-motion animation alive, both with his live-action films and his animated offerings like Corpse Bride and Frankenweenie (and even movies that he didn’t direct, like The Nightmare Before Christmas). Still, at this stage in his career, it’s hard to not feel like Burton’s days as a revolutionary storyteller are truly well behind him.
MORE: Inside the Twisted Mind of Tim Burton & His Films
Source: Screen Junkies
