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Review: Tim Burton's Vincent (1993)

By Kirsty Leckie Palmer
Monday 19th October 2009
A spindly black cat slinks along a wall beyond the sinewy grasp of shadow-wrought branches, and drops elegantly into a bare room in which a skeletal boy dreams of becoming horror-hero Vincent Price. This is pure Burton, distilled into a seven minute short, a glimpse at the master of gothic before Disney sunk a commercial claw into his aesthetic sensibilities. So incongruous with the bubble-wrapped banality of current children’s stories, this little boy figures himself replete with the billowing cigarette holder and quilted smoking jacket characteristic of his idol. Laden with nostalgia for a filmic era never to be regained, and travelling into the intense realms of a child’s imagination, Vincent is a dark story disguised as a moral, which clearly functions on a semi-biographical level. Loaded with elements of the expressionistic, the emerging shapes which will later define the character of Burton’s aesthetic; his characteristic amalgamation of darkness and innocence emerges with fully-fledged poise. This is also, for all its six minutes, an intensely self-aware little film. The Cabinet of Dr Caligari and Nosferatu could be alluded to, but assuredly Burton innovates, rather than replicates. He adroitly lulls us toward a disconcerting denouement, which petitions us to explore our imaginations for a conclusion.  


 Rating: Five Stars