Last night the Princess and I went to see Alice, Through the Looking Glass, the latest Tim Burton movie. Of course we loved it. Burton is one of the most interesting story-tellers of our time. Did you know he is two years younger than me? And also, like me, he began as a cartoonist and is totally dedicated to the idea that every artist is a surrealist and must exaggerate, elucidate, equivocate, and numerous other things that start with the letter “e” and end with the suffix “ate” simply because that’s how surrealism starts. You notice a little bit of weirdness in real life and blow it all out of proportion with lies and coloring of meaning and relentless “what-iffing?” If you don’t see surrealism in those last two sentences of purple paisley prose… then maybe you can see it visually in Burton’s many masterpieces.
Tim Burton began his legacy as an apprentice Disney animator specializing in stop-motion animation. But he was just another creative nobody like me until the launch of his small-budget monster hit, Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure.
Of course, any time you can pull in huge profits for little investments, you will have Hollywood executives ramming the heads of their unpaid interns like battering rams against your door so they can get in and throw money at you.
Hence, Batman.
Batman was the first time I actually took notice of Tim. And not just as a director of a film… eventually two films. He was gifted at assembling a cast. And this would work to his advantage as several singular talents attached themselves to him and worked in his movie projects repeatedly.
And his repeated collaboration with Danny Elfman and his music was easily as great a master-stroke of genius as John Williams with Spielberg and Lucas.
He has repeatedly used his movies to describe and rewrite his own life story as a misunderstood genius flubbing horribly in the quest to fit in with a world full of “regular people”.
Poster for the film ‘Edward Scissorhands’ (directed by Tim Burton), 1990. (Photo by Buyenlarge/Getty Images)
His sense of humor, of course, is distinctly and colorfully bizarre.
DSTF-0046r JOHNNY DEPP as Barnabas Collins in Warner Bros. Pictures and Village Roadshow Pictures DARK SHADOWS, a Warner Bros. Pictures release.
Burton is, just like me, a child of the 70’s. He references things like the old gothic soap opera, Dark Shadows, that were a part of his impressionable youth just as they were mine. He picks stories about things he truly cares about, and that is also just like me.
So, in a rather bizarre coincidence that is entirely appropriate to surrealists, I love any Tim Burton movie simply because it is a Tim Burton movie. He is probably me in an alternate dimension. And as such, I already know I will love his next movie, whatever the heck it is.
Catch a Falling Star 
Finding My Voice
As Big MacIntosh welcomes more little ponies into my insanely large doll collection, I have been reading my published novel Snow Babies. The novel is written in third person viewpoint with a single focus character for each scene. But because the story is about a whole community surviving a blizzard with multiple story lines criss-crossing and converging only to diverge and dance away from each other again, the focus character varies from scene to scene.
Big MacIntosh finds himself to be the leader of a new group of My Little Ponies.
In Canto Two, Valerie Clarke, the central main character of the story, is the focus character. Any and all thoughts suggested by the narrative occur only in Valerie’s pretty little head. Canto Three is focused through the mind of Trailways bus driver Ed Grosland. Canto Four focuses on Sheriff’s Deputy Cliff Baily. And so, on it goes through a multitude of different heads, some heroic, some wise, some idiotic, and some mildly insane. Because it is a comedy about orphans freezing to death, some of the focus characters are even thinking at the reader through frozen brains.
The ponies decide to visit Minnie Mouse’s recycled Barbie Dreamhouse where Olaf the Snowman is the acting butler.
That kind of fractured character focus threatens to turn me schizophrenic. I enjoy thinking like varied characters and changing it up, but the more I write, the more the characters become like me, and the more I become them. How exactly do you manage a humorous narrative voice when you are constantly becoming someone else and morphing the way you talk to fit different people? Especially when some of your characters are stupid people with limited vocabularies and limited understanding?
The ponies are invited to live upstairs with the evil rabbit, Pokemon, and Minions.
I did an entire novel, Superchicken, in third person viewpoint with one focus character, Edward-Andrew Campbell, the Superchicken himself. That is considerably less schizophrenic than the other book. But it is still telling a story in my voice with my penchant for big words, metaphors, and exaggerations.
The novel I am working on in rough draft manuscript form right now, The Baby Werewolf, is done entirely in first person point of view. That is even more of an exercise of losing yourself inside the head of a character who is not you. One of the first person narrators is a girl, and one is a werewolf. So, I have really had to stretch my writing ability to make myself into someone else multiple times.
I assure you, I am working hard to find a proper voice with which to share my personal wit and wisdom with the world. But if the men in white coats come to lock me away in a loony bin somewhere, it won’t be because I am playing a lot with My Little Ponies.
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Tagged as My Little Pony, Snow Babies