Critique - Tim Burton's Vincent.

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The technique used to create this short film animation, was stopmotion.
Burton, along with Disney animator Rick Heinrichs, stop motion aminator Stephen Chiodo and cameraman Victor Abdalov, worked on the project for two months, just for this one 5 minute short film.

It was shot in black and white, to give a more ‘horror’ like effect, which went well with the theme of the animation.

Vincent is the story of a boy, Vincent Malloy, who thinks he is like the actor Vincent Price (who narrates the film). He is obsessed with Edgar Allen Poe and his dark stories. When he reads the stories, it detaches him from his real life, and it leads into his delusions that he is in fact a tortured artist, deprived of the woman he loves, which is very similar to certain parts of Edgar Allen Poe's ‘The Raven’. The film ends with Vincent feeling scared of being tortured by his make-believe world, quoting from ‘The Raven’ as he falls to the floor in, believing himself to be dead.

The character in the animation, Vincent Malloy, was created to bear a resemblance to Tim Burton.

Most of Tim Burton’s style of film is influenced from watching horror films as he was growing up. He also took influences from his childhood heroes, like Edgar Allen Poe, and Dr. Seuss.
Originally, Tim only had the idea to release Vincent as a poem for a children’s short story book, but it had received interest from his friends working for Disney.

The intentions of the film were met.
To show how successful it was, the film was theatrically released for two weeks in a Los Angeles cinema. As well as that, it received several critical accolades when it was played at films festivals in London, Seattle and Chicago, where it won two awards. It also won the Critics’ Prize at the Annecy Film Festival in France.

As one of Tim Burton’s first animation films, it succeeded well, and showed off the early developments of how his skills were to be used in the future, for films such as Nightmare Before Christmas, and Corpse Bride.

The weaknesses in Vincent were that it was very short. I feel that if the film had been carried out more and made a bit longer, it would have received more awards, and been more well known.
However, as a positive, I like how Burton created Vincent to be a ‘different’ child. In the film, his mother has a set idea on how she wants her child to be, like to ask him to go out and play, but he refuses to do so. He is seen different to societies’ standards, and I like how it proves a point that not every child is the same.