Inside Burton’s World

I have visited two exhibitions dedicated to Tim Burton. The first in Turin, Italy, and the second, smaller one in Prague.
For someone who has admired his work for years, seeing the original sketches, paintings, books, puppets, film fragments and personal notes was something entirely different from simply watching the finished films.
Burton’s world has always fascinated me.
Its strange mixture of darkness and tenderness, humour and melancholy, grotesque forms and deeply human characters has a language of its own. I return to his films every year, and they never seem to lose their atmosphere.
What I found especially moving in these exhibitions was the feeling of being allowed a little closer to the source.
Behind the familiar characters and stories are hundreds of drawings, ideas, visual experiments and fragments of imagination. Seeing them together made me understand his work differently. Not only as a collection of films, but as a very personal universe that has been growing for decades.
In a way, Tim Burton opened a door into his own inner world.
And after walking through it, many of his characters suddenly seemed even more understandable.