Production and Release
While 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 Wilhite. The two were impressed with Burton's unique talents and while not "Disney material", they felt he deserved to be given respect. As such, in 1982, Wilhite gave 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.
Together with fellow Disney animator Rick Heinrichs, stop motion animator Stephen Chiodo and cameraman Victor Abdalov, Burton 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 1920s, Vincent imagines himself in a series of situations inspired by the Vincent Price/Edgar Allan Poe films that had such an effect on Burton as a child, including experimenting on his dog—a theme that would subsequently appear in Frankenweenie—and welcoming his aunt home while simultaneously conjuring up the image of her dipped in hot wax. Vincent Malloy, the main character in the film, bears a striking resemblance to Tim Burton himself.
The film was narrated by Burton's childhood idol Vincent Price and marked the beginning of a friendship between them that lasted until Price's death in 1993. Burton credits the experience as one of the most shaping experiences of his life.
The film was theatrically released for two weeks in one Los Angeles cinema with the teen drama Tex. Before it was consigned to the Disney vaults, it garnered several critical accolades when it played at film festivals in London, Chicago and Seattle, winning two awards at Chicago and the Critics' Prize at the Annecy Film Festival in France. Disney was pleased with the film, but they did not know what to do with it.
Read more about this topic: Vincent (film)
Famous quotes containing the words production and/or release:
“An art whose limits depend on a moving image, mass audience, and industrial production is bound to differ from an art whose limits depend on language, a limited audience, and individual creation. In short, the filmed novel, in spite of certain resemblances, will inevitably become a different artistic entity from the novel on which it is based.”
—George Bluestone, U.S. educator, critic. “The Limits of the Novel and the Limits of the Film,” Novels Into Film, Johns Hopkins Press (1957)
“The shallow consider liberty a release from all law, from every constraint. The wise man sees in it, on the contrary, the potent Law of Laws.”
—Walt Whitman (1819–1892)