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( written by the 1°STG3/2 after the day out with Mrs Demeulenaere and Menissier on May 4th 2012) “The building was designed by the famous architect Frank Gehry”

The Tim Burton exhibition

A series of photographs by Tim Burton, the famous film director who grew up in the suburbian town of Burbank, California ( his childhood deeply influenced his satirical portrayal of dull American suburbs in many of his movies), was displayed so as to make the visitor familiar with the themes to be found again and again in his films such as death that he often represents as being more colourful than life ( skulls and corpses or broken dolls are omnipresent for instance) Then we enter in a fluorescent room that delighted Burton’s children as much as the visitors. The room was also decorated with a merry-go-round so typical of the world of Tim Burton in which children always play a central role. Then Burton’s drawings full of mesmerizing spirals, checkers and stripes were displayed along with the figures of Corpse Bride and many other characters from his films such as the famous Stain Boy (the “S” on his costume stands for Stain) a superhero created in 1997. This is a character which has so much in common with its creator. Tim Burton turned Stain Boy into the hero of a TV series. For the fans,the costume of Edward Scissorhands and the red dress of the Lady in Dark shadows as well as many accessories used in Mars Attacks or Charlie and the Chocolate Factory were really impressive Here and there in the museum, some of Bruton’s early cinematographic works and video clips Or one could also watch Batman (1992) on some bigger screens Tim Burton was inspired by Batman because he is a super hero who is deprived of powers but is fighting to protect innocent people . For when Batman was a child his parents got killed in front of him and he was so shocked that he decided to protect the city. Tim Burton wanted to show people’s dark side in this film.

Meeting Sophie Roze

This young woman is a French director specialized in animated movies who talked to us about Burton’s influences and presented her own work. Tim Burton is an admirer of Willis O’Brien, the creator of the special effects in King Kong, and of Ray Harryhausen, who takes up the torch in movies that Burton discovered very young in the cinema, like Jason and Argonautes. But Burton’s real idol , is the actor Vincent Price, whom he discovered in a series of telefilms adapting short stories by Edgar Allan Poe. He admitted he didn’t know why the movies in which Price appeared left on him " indelible tracks ", but he completely identified with the restless characters he embodied and felt attracted by his Gothic and romantic universe. Burton’s first short, "Vincent", is a tribute to Price whose voice can be heard telling the story. The meeting between the fan and the idol was a success and a deep friendship linked both men until Price’s death in 1993. Before this tragic event, Burton offered him the role-key of the inventor in "Edward Scissorhands" and began the shooting of a documentary on him which will unfortunately remain unfinished. Finally Vincent Price had a major influence on Burton’s career because it is thanks to his support that Burton started believing in his own possibilities while he was just an anonymous animator at Disney, and had the strength to impose his ideas to the Hollywood system... Since the end of the 70’s, the Brothers Quay, identical twins, made a unique contribution to the world of the animation generally speaking and to the movie of puppets in particular. Filtering esoteric influences, literary, musical, filmic and philosophic through the immense sensibility which characterizes them, each of their movies gets our attention thanks to their hypnotic control of decorations, music and movements evoking dreams in half-awakened and childhood memories that are generally suppressed but can also become the source of so much fascination .

The movement is decomposed in a succesion of fixed images the vision of which gives the illusion of a continuous movement as if the the director was taking a photo then another one. 24 photos per second are needed to create the fluidity of a movement.

At this point Sophie Roze explained how a puppet could be animated and filmed - a slow but rewarding process since it took her an entire day of work to produce 6 seconds of her film and 10 months to make her 12-minute long « les Escargots de Joseph »