Letters to the Editor
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Tim Burton is no Addams Family!
The reason Tim Burton's animated pics work better is due to all the work and detail that goes into the clay/puppet characters and sets. His live-action movies fail because Tim Burton's only inspiration, which he tries to recapture again picture after picture, is really too flimsy. What's the point of having talented actors play wooden, paper-thin characters in kitschy, gloomy roles.
His movies are a variation on the theme of The Adams Family. Except that The Addams Family was far more original and inspired in its attempt to fuse something warm and loving with something lifeless and superfically frigtening. The Addams' are a family of unique and odd individuals who have the courage and confidence to accept themselves and each other despite being odd, macabre and socially 'unacceptable.' The very idea of what society thinks is acceptable is laughed it in the TV series with the array of guest stars it delighted in scaring away from the Addams family home. The TV series was so charming in Black-and-white at a time when Color was still relatively new. It's low production value only added to its intimacy. Wikipedia almost calls the genre "affectionate horror," an exemplary case being Mel Brooks' masterpiece Young Frankenstein.
But Tim Burton doesn't have the comic abilities of a Mel Brooks and can't or doesn't bring the intimate charm of an Addams family to his films. The only one of his pictures that achieves a fusion of something meaningful with something lifeless is Edward Scissorhands. Most of the rest end up being gimmicky, high on production value and low on genuine warmth, without a capacity to grab us and give us something human and satisfying. His films are too often cliched and rely too heavily on a single trick, that of the charming fused with the dead, and peter out of artistic fuel too soon before floundering to an end. Mr. Burton would do well to make shorter films, much shorter. Perhaps 15 minutes would suffice to exhaust his imaginative scope.