“Tim doesn’t do love letters. He does love pictures.” – Helena Bonham Carter

“To be absolutely honest, Tim didn’t really speak much when we first met on ‘Planet of the Apes.’ I said that there should be an orphanage set up for the abandoned sentences of Tim Burton. He does words now, but at the beginning he’d just give me pictures. He courted me mutely with these self-portraits of his disembodied head. Who wouldn’t fall? We ran away on a road trip and hibernated in a cabin to get to know each other. And I watched him draw and paint, little picture after little picture.”

– Helena Bonham Carter

The pictures above are drawings Tim Burton created when courting his former domestic partner Helena Bonham Carter. The quote from Carter regarding the beginning of her relationship with Burton shows describes his quietness in much the same way as the previous articles. In the drawings, Burton draws only his head. In one picture,  Burton writes a short poem, and in the other, he places his head over high heel shoes to visualize the saying “head over heels”.

Before I saw these drawings, I did not know much about Burton’s romantic side. That side of him, however, still fits his dark style. He doesn’t use any color in his drawings and is very minimal on words. As Carter described, he didn’t write love letters in the traditional sense. He spoke through his drawings, and I think that can be said about his film career as well. I also learned that Burton continuously draws himself with his mouth sewn shut. The first drawing shown here makes note of that in the accompanying poem, but the second makes no reference to not speaking or being unable to speak, yet it is implied in the drawing. While I knew from the previous writings that Burton is a very quiet man, I wasn’t aware to the extent to which he recognized that about himself. The drawing also makes me feel like Burton may feel like he is unable to speak his mind, and so uses his art to say what he cannot.

These drawings are very beneficial in helping me to answer my guiding question by providing insight into Tim Burton’s mind and the ways in which he prefers to express himself to others. It is plain to see that Burton prefers using visual representations to express his personal feelings. His movies, then, can be seen as an extension of this. His Dr. Seuss influences can also clearly be seen in the first of the two drawings. The poem that he writes is in a rhythm and rhyme scheme comparable to that of Seuss’ stories. If Burton expresses his very personal feelings of love in this format, it is easy to assume that his movies will also have aspects relating to his own personal experiences.