SPIELBERG 2

From The Economist, vol 323 n 7765, 06.27.1992 Dateline: LOS ANGELES

Many critics are calling Tim Burton the most imaginative and creative film maker to emerge in America since Steven Spielberg. His Batman Returns, which has opened in the United States amid much hyperbole, confirms that the 33-year-old director is a master at inventing characters and bizarre worlds.

Just as Jaws catapulted Mr. Spielberg in 1976 into the status of super director, so Batman did the same for Mr. Burton in 1989. It became an international success, with $406m in gross box-office receipts. Yet two other films did as much as Batman to reveal the potential of his peculiar imagination.

In Edward Scissorhands he told the story of a young man living in a haunted house who, with scissors for hands, struggled to fit into contemporary society. Beetlejuice, released in 1988, was just as queer a story. The ghosts of a dead couple ask a foul-mouthed and perverted ghoul to chase a family from their home. It too did well financially.

Mr. Burton says that he almost passed up the chance to make Batman Returns. He agreed to do it only after he was given the opportunity to revamp the film's story line. "I wanted to fool around in this world and see what happens. So I didn't treat it as a sequel but as a Batman movie with different themes."

Dual personality is one of the main themes in Batman Returns. The story portrays the Catwoman, played by Michelle Pfeiffer, as an extraordinarily complicated character. She is lonely and under-appreciated as a woman but a cunning kick-boxer when she metamorphoses into a feline animal. The director also turns Penguin, the villain played by Danny DeVito, into a complex character. The part-man, part-bird evokes some sympathy from film audiences when they learn his parents abandoned him in a sewer during childhood because of his gross deformities.

Meticulous attention to detail is a hallmark of Mr. Burton's work. He ordered the construction of dozens of mechanical penguins to complement about 50 real ones used in the film. No filming was done on location. Instead he recreated the fictional Gotham City on sound stages. Air conditioners kept the temperature at 38 degreesF (3 degreesC) during the 12-hour daily filming sessions.

The result is a darker Batman. All told, it is a marked departure from 1960s television series which merely turned Batman into a full-motion bam!-boom!-zonk! comic strip. "You see glimmers of Tim in the first Batman, but this movie is all Tim's," says Denise DiNovi, who co-produced the film with Mr. Burton.

The son of a professional baseball player, Mr. Burton was born and raised in Burbank, California. He was an unusual child. While his friends were involved in sport or rode bicycles for amusement, he sometimes played alone at a local cemetery. He also developed a knack for drawing. As a teenager, he won an anti-litter poster-drawing competition. The city of Burbank used his entry on its rubbish lorries.

After studying animation at CalArts in California, he worked at Walt Disney Studios where he became interested in directing. His first film, Frankenweenie, was a 28-minute animated remake of the 1931 production of Frankenstein. That film convinced a Warner Brothers executive to give him a chance to direct Pee Wee's Big Adventure.

If Batman III never comes to pass, Mr. Burton has plenty of projects to keep him occupied. He is writing two children's books for Disney's Hyperion Press. Another book by HarperCollins will feature his artwork. He is also producing an animated television series, Family Dog. His next feature film, A Nightmare Before Christmas, opens in the United States this winter. One can just imagine how Santa Claus will fare in Mr. Burton's Yuletide story.