I had a Tim Burton marathon to evaluate his filmography. I skipped Pee Wee's Big Adventure, Batman, Batman Returns, Beetlejuice, Edward Scissorhands, Mars Attacks, Big Fish, Big Eyes, Planet of the Apes and Dumbo. I am familiar with those enough. That leaves Sleepy Hollow, Sweeney Todd, Miss Peregrine..., Vincent, the 80s and 2010s versions of Frankenweenie, Corpse Bride, Charlie & The Chocolate Family & Alice in Wonderland, Shelly Duvall's Aladdin. The obscure films I had mostly never seen.
His aesthetic is built on a childlike cartooning of horror film tropes. Again and again his films reflect his biography as a moody California outsider to a depressed Disney animator to a star director of Hollywood blockbusters and small Gothic serio-comedies. The films reflect his always shifting on the spectrum of positive and negative, black and white. This has left him seen as wildly uneven, repetitive but also unpredictable and cathartic in his obsessively dialectic style.
As an auteur, which camp does he fall? He's known more for dark Eurocentric visuals, weird characters, grand setpieces and excessive visual effects so he's erroneously thrown in with horror directors or oddball New Hollywood types like M. Night or even Spielberg. I think thats more to do with the commercial projects offered to him. Sadly, he's matured into a "Franchise" director for hire, selling his popular style for an excuse to experiment and collect a fat check with his famous friends. Even then, he's one of the better in that genre.
But as a stylist and a potential poet, I find Tim Burton in the realm of dark liberal satirists like Billy Wilder, Roman Polanski, Mike Nichols, Tobe Hooper, later Woody Allen with the shrewd commercial sensibility of B-movie capitalists like Roger Corman, Charles Band, H.G. Lewis, Joe Dante. I think its fair to argue Burton inspired and paved the way for filmmakers like Wes Anderson, J.J. Abrams
Its important to note he was mentored by Francis Ford Coppola who produced Sleepy Hollow and whose young daughter Sofia starred in Frankenweenie. Interestingly, Coppola took some tonal & stylistic cues from Burton when he made Dracula with Winona Ryder. A queasy subversive element arrives in Burton's work when you tie together how many pedophiliac references there are from the casting of Jeffrey Jones & Paul Reubens to Winona Ryder being the goddaughter of NAMBLA member Allen Ginsberg and Johnny Depp's ties to Ginsberg & Polanski. It could just be coincidental and expected in such a small fringe group of Hollywood weirdos.
But Burton's films also have a preoccupation with the sexuality of young girls. The villains seek to attain it, almost always from small blond underage girls, but they rather give it to the dark man-child hero. An underage Winona Ryder as Beetlejuice's child bride and the teenage love interest of Edward Scissorhands. Sofia Coppola plays this archetypal blond desire object in Burton's original Frankenweenie. In the remake, the little blonde is represented as a creepy girl obsessed with Burton's avatar and replaced by a little Goth girl. In Burton's personal life you can chart this sexual obsession in his romance & breakup from blonde bombshell Lisa Marie to marry the dark, eccentric Helena Bonham Carter. Since their divorce, Burton returned the blond teenage lover in Alice (the last film to feature Carter) and Miss Peregrine. Alice also featured a 50ish Crispin Glover trying to seduce the barely legal Alice.
There's also the references to Michael Jackson in Johnny Depp's performances as Scissorhands and Wonka. Chocolate Factory ends with Willy Wonka inviting Charlie to live with him alone and becoming upset that Charlie insisting on keeping his family.
Almost as disturbing but not at all surprising is, as Burton's motif shifted from black & white contradiction to a synthesized moral grayness, his politics have shifted to centrism. Miss Peregrine is a quirky but lazy X-Men ripoff that also serves as a Zionist propaganda. During WW2, a group of genetically superior white children are terrorized by the dark skinned Samuel L Jackson's shadowy, Nazi-like band of child-eating villains. The solution? They are guaranteed a piece of land as sanctuary just for existing. These children are never shown as heroic superheroes protecting society either. They're valuable just because they are different and persecuted. The metaphor is clear.
Burton's films always center on the "magic" of individualist entrepreneurship, middle class values, Eurocentrism, white normality, a distaste for the working class and many visual references to Freemasonry including checkerboard, secret societies, aristocracy, favoring hierarchical systems to equality and a love of Disney. Either Tim Burton is just so within the Hollywood bubble that he doesn't see the Masonic influence on his own work or he's supportive of their craft of Republican centralism against expanding democracy aka socialism. Likely, he's a Mason himself. They are often sickly little European guys in big business. Batman was obviously his first big Masonic work.
