Word: burtonizing
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...Burton's gift is to make movies about beguiling outsiders -- the dead couple reclaiming their home in Beetlejuice, the deformed snow sculptor Edward Scissorhands, even the childlike Pee-wee Herman (Paul Reubens plays the Penguin's father here). Burton inverts pictures and fictions, and makes it seem as if he has just turned them right side up. In Batman Returns, everything is familiarly topsy-turvy. Black is good -- Batman, of course -- and white or bright is bad. Max, the rapacious industrialist, has a Stokowskian white mane that helps Gothamites think of him as Santa Claus, though Selina derisively calls...
...Burton knows that moviegoers, just like the Penguin, need their oversize playthings. So he and production designer Bo Welch provided toys for the kids. The new-model Batmobile can get ultraslim (fast!) and slip through the narrowest crevice. The Penguin's parasol becomes an Umbrella-Copter, spiriting him out of the trouble he loves to make. At the end he sends his commando squadron of penguins to destroy the city: tuxedoed birds wearing embossed shields, tiny helmets and missiles with candy-cane stripes ( it is Christmas) on their backs. Some of the penguins were real, some were robot puppets, some...
...Batman TV series, Burgess Meredith played Penguin as a kind of deranged F.D.R. This was not for DeVito. "I didn't see myself playing a weird Nick Charles with a martini glass and a tuxedo," he says. "It just didn't tickle my fancy." Then Burton showed him a painting he had done of "a toddler with a big round head and big eyes and a protrusion in the nose and mouth and a bulbous body with little appendages. And there was a caption that said, 'My name is Jimmy, but they call me the hideous penguin...
...dispenses with realism and aspires to animation, to the freedom of idea and image found in the best feature-length cartoons. Most directors think pictures have to be anchored in the narrowest form of reality: the one that Hollywood has presented since the dawn of sound 65 years ago. Burton, once an animator at Disney, understands that to go deeper, you must fly higher, to liberation from plot into poetry. Here he's done it. This Batman soars...
BUREAUS: Suzanne Davis (Director of Administration) Chief Political Correspondent: Michael Kramer Washington Contributing Editor: Hugh Sidey Senior Correspondents: David Aikman, Jonathan Beaty, Sandra Burton, Barry Hillenbrand, J. Madeleine Nash, Bruce van Voorst...