"Vincent Malloy is seven years old, he's always polite and does what he's told. For a boy his age, he's considerate and nice but he wants to be just like Vincent Price."
Young Vincent's vivid imagination takes him on a macabre journey into a fantastical and weird world in which his home is filled with spiders and bats, his aunt becomes an exhibit in his wax museum, and his beautiful wife is buried in his mother's flower bed.
Vincent is a 1982 stop motion short animation film written, designed and directed by Tim Burton and Rick Heinrichs and is approximately six minutes long. The film is narrated by actor Vincent Price, a lifelong idol and inspiration to Tim Burton. Vincent is the story of a young boy, Vincent Malloy, who pretends to be like actor Vincent Price who narrates the film. He is obsessed with the tales of Edgar Allan Poe, and it is his detachment from reality when reading them that leads to his delusions. The film ends with Vincent feeling terrified of being tortured by the going on's of his make believe world quoting "The Raven" as he falls to the floor in frailty, believing himself to be dead.
Whilst working as a conceptual artist at Walt Disney Animation Studios, Tim Burton found himself two allies in the shape of Disney executive Julie Hickson, and Head of Creative Development Tom White. The two were impressed with Burton's unique talents and while not "Disney material", they felt he deserved to be given respect. In 1992, Wilhite gave Tim Burton $60,000, to produce an adaptation of a poem Burton had written titled Vincent. Burton had originally planned the poem to be a children's short story book but thought otherwise. Burton had worked on the project for two months and came up with the five minute short film. Shot in stark black and white in the style of the German expressionist films of the 1920's, Vincent imagines himself in a series of situations inspired by the Vincent Price/Edgar Allen Poe films that had such an affect on Burton as a child.
(Some information used as reference from Wikipedia.)
My Opinions.
Based on a poem that Tim Burton had composed himself, Vincent tells the story of a little boy who wants to grow up to be just like Vincent Price, the popular horror actor, and Burton's childhood idol. The narrative has a singalong feel to it along with the dark concept to the classic B movie horror films that Burton and myself grew up on. Among other influences within the short animation are Edgar Allen Poe and Mary Shelley, both of course prolific horror writers that have inspired many films themselves. "Vincent" is to my knowledge, the first major use of claymation, the animation technique that featured in Tim Burton's "Nightmare Before Christmas" along with the stop motion technique where you are required to continuously shoot pictures whilst moving the object slightly and continuing this until the desired amount of footage is met. The short film is an ideal way of discovering exciting new additions to cinema, both in technique, and in directing, acting and photography.
This short animation is definitely effective, it's an amazing way to get kids interested in the strange and creepy world of horror. This would have been the kind of thing that I could enjoy as a kid, as deranged as I am. A lot of the designs in Vincent will remind you of Beetlejuice as it has the same weird and quirky style of art. If Tim Burton's intentions were to engross people into his mad and delusional world of art then he definitely did so with this short animation he created. Immediately you know this is Tim Burton's work due to the creepy, dark, sinister and weird visuals he portrays throughout it and his other work.
I wouldn't say there were any weaknesses throughout this short stop motion animation, actually I don't think there are weaknesses to any of Tim Burton's work, to me it is all incredibly done. One thing that could have been improved on in Vincent was Tim Burton should have definitely made it LONGER. I enjoyed every minute of it but I wanted to see more, the animation was fantastically done, the use of stop motion and claymation is brilliant. To show how successful this animation was, the animation was theatrically released for two weeks in a Los Angelas cinema. It received several critical accolades when it was played at film festivals in London, Seattle and Chicago where it won two awards.
Tim Burton's "Vincent."
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