Tim Burton : Filmmaker Heads To Melbourne

Film buffs, Art lover and Goths... prepare to have your Tim Burton loving minds blown!

The Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI) joins Melbourne Winter Masterpieces 2010 with an exclusive Australian exhibition direct from The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York.

Victorian Premier John Brumby joined Arts Minister, the Hon Lynne Kosky, and ACMI Director Tony Sweeney to announce that the first and most significant retrospective of filmmaker and artist Tim Burton would be presented at ACMI in a brand new exhibition.

The major exhibition, presented as part of Melbourne Winter Masterpieces 2010, will explore the full scale of Tim Burton's career, as director, concept artist illustrator and photographer, through hundreds of artworks that spectacularly illuminate the creative vision behind Beetlejuice, Batman, Edward Scissorhands, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and Sweeney Todd.

Tracing Burton's visual imagination from his earliest childhood drawings through his mature work in film, the exhibition Tim Burton brings together over 700 examples of rarely or never-before-seen drawings, paintings, photographs, storyboards, moving image works, puppets, maquettes, costumes, and cinematic ephemera, and includes an extensive film series spanning his twenty seven year career.


ACMI Board President John Thwaites today said that ACMI was attracting international attention through its exhibition programs.

ACMI Director Tony Sweeney has hinted that the exhibition will include little known drawings, paintings, and sculptures created in the spirit of contemporary Pop Surrealism, alongside works from conception to production from Burton's short and feature films.

"Burton's amazing catalogue of work and his inspirational artistry has garnered him an international audience of fans and he has influenced a generation of young artists across the moving image art spectrum," said Tony Sweeney.

The largest exhibition to ever be presented in ACMI's Gallery 1 has been curated in direct collaboration with Burton and features artworks and objects drawn from his personal archive, as well as studio archives and private collections.

Also featured are his student and early non-professional films; his long-unseen television adaptation Hansel and Gretel (1983); examples of his work for the flash animation internet series The World of Stainboy (2000); a selection of the artist's oversized Polaroid prints; graphic art and texts for non-film projects, like The Melancholy Death of Oyster Boy and Other Stories (1997) and Tim Burton's Tragic Toys for Girls and Boys (2003) collectible figure series; and art from a number of early unrealised projects.

The exhibition follows the course of Burton's career, with childhood ephemera and amateur short films from his youth in Burbank, California; cartoons and drawings from his time at California Institute of the Arts; and examples of his first professional work at The Walt Disney Studios.

Burton's artistic output includes shorts Vincent (1982) and Frankenweenie (1984); and 15 feature films including Pee-Wee's Big Adventure (1985), Batman Returns (1992), Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993), Ed Wood (1994), Mars Attacks! (1996), Sleepy Hollow (1999), Planet of the Apes (2001), Big Fish (2003), Tim Burton's Corpse Bride (2005) and Alice in Wonderland (2010).

Tim Burton will open at ACMI on 24 June and run until 10 October 2010. Burton will also be at ACMI in Melbourne for the opening of the exhibition.

Tim Burton is the second Melbourne Winter Masterpiece exhibition at ACMI after Pixar : 20 years of Animation, which broke international attendance records in 2007.