The World of Tim Burton: a fantastical voyage inside the filmmaker’s mind

From Edward Scissorhands costumes to unseen sketches, there is much for Burton fans and newcomers to feast on in the Design Museum’s show

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Some artists spend years in the wilderness before finding their path, but as is immediately, wonderfully clear in the Design Museum’s new show, Tim Burton found his path very early indeed. Not only could he draw expressively and distinctively from a young age, he seems to have been able to direct art too. A picture of him trussed up in a skeleton costume that he instructed his mother to make for Halloween when he was nine is already unmistakably Burtonesque. 
The exhibition, which began as a show in New York, has now been curated afresh for the Design Museum, with mostly delightful results. The first room, made to look like a suburban street, explores Burton’s dreary upbringing in Burbank, California, a sprawl of identikit houses and precision-cut lawns that would later form the backdrop for his 1990 film Edward Scissorhands. 
Burton was, we learn without great surprise, a misfit child – not particularly athletic, but arty and cultured; he felt, he recalled, like he’d grown up inside “a shoebox”. He drew constantly, winning a competition to design a local anti-littering sign at 16, displayed here along with a newspaper clipping about it. Two years later, he wrote and illustrated a beautifully atmospheric children’s book and sent it to Disney for publication (they rejected it, but respectfully, and later hired him as an animator). 
Other parts of the exhibition are devoted to Burton’s film work, his photographs and weird sculptures, other bits and pieces from a packed career. Particularly charming are doodles Burton drew between 1995 and 2011 on paper napkins. Some recall the lugubrious work of Edward Gorey; others, like the sketch of a “chocolate moose”, bring to mind the dead-eyed wit of David Shrigley. 
If the exhibition’s hope is to expand the viewer’s sense of Burton’s style, it fails. What strikes isn’t how much he has evolved as an artist and story-teller, but how much he hasn’t. Visitors who aren’t on board with the dark palettes and staring eyes, the overfriendly monsters and ever-living dead won’t find much escape. 
But for newcomers and Burton fans, there is much to feast on. A highlight, in the film section, is the costume that Johnny Depp wore in Edward Scissorhands; with its straps and buckles and studs, it wouldn’t look out of place at a Berlin techno night. There is also enticing evidence of projects that never saw the light of day. A Gruffalo-like drawing from the early 1980s shows Burton’s idea for a version of Romeo and Juliet, which he pitched to Disney as a tale of two star-crossed creatures separated by land and sea. There are also fun sketches of deranged-looking pirates; you wish Disney had given the ideas a go. 
Some parts of the exhibition don’t quite work. A recreation of Burton’s desk is oddly sanitised; motifs appear so often they become deadening. But the exhibition does inspire gratitude that this kid from Burbank, California, was given such gifts, and that he has so tirelessly – and wittily – put them to work over so many years. 
From October 25 until April 21; designmuseum.org
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