Our thoughts on the Tim Burton exhibition at the Design Museum

Oct 31, 2024

The World of Tim Burton at the Design Museum, review and star rating: ★★★★☆

The Design Museum is leveraging itself as a heritage attraction of equal weight to the behemoths of South Kensington. Its latest exhibitions, a look inside the world of Barbie and, newly opened this week, The World of Tim Burton, are both near sell-outs. You can’t get into the homage to America’s master of the Gothic until mid-November; 36,000 pre-sale tickets were sold in the first week. Museum staffers reckon the Burton exhibit will outsell the 140,00 who’ve been through the Barbie exhibit so far. It’s a way off the record set by Christian Dior: Designer of Dreams at the V&A, which saw 594,994 visitors in 2019, but nonetheless, these numbers show off the Design Museum’s enticing appeal.

You enter into a light and airy high-ceilinged space coloured with splashes of pastel, quite dissimilar to the macabre themes and motifs of Burton’s films. The message is clear: it would do Burton a disservice to dress his work up in a highly stylised show; the focus instead is creating a gallery-like experience focusing on his drawings, many of which haven’t been seen before.

It’s nice that there’s very little text to stand and read; the journey invites you mostly to simply stand and stare. Areas are broken down into his inspiration, props and work beyond film. There is the Michelle Pfeiffer Catwoman suit, Oompa Loompas, the sand monster from Beetlejuice and props from the Corpse Bride among the three-dimensional items on display, but the exhibition’s highest value is in its careful curation of drawings that tell you stories beyond his most famous films. Crazily imaginative etchings each offer vivid new ways into Tim Burton’s labyrinthine mind, showing how much of it we don’t know. After all, as the exhibition reminds us, he’s been going for 50 years.

You start with Burton’s award-winning pre-fame work, including the 1973 Crush Litter campaign his illustrations were published as a part of when he was aged 18. Immense amounts of drawings from shelved film projects further illustrate the depth and scope of his work. There are horrible amphibious green monsters with tentacles for legs and eight eyes, and humans dressed ordinarily for their top-halves, but with the lower bodies of some obese sewer-dwelling animal that happens to be wearing pretty high-heeled pink shoes.

There are reams of imaginative worlds that never made it. It’s engrossing to pick up privately in your mind where Burton’s ideas were publicly halted by movie execs; some, including his Superman Lives film, were never completed even though they made it a year into production. It makes you fear how people with much less cache are treated.

It goes beyond his film work into Tim Burton’s interest in large-scale Polaroid photography, including the magnetic Blue Girl with black holes for eyes. Illustrations signifying mental health are also on display, including one drawing of an Earth eating its population, and there are other photo series. They are less remarkable as stand-alones; you feel Burton is best incorporating themes into his film narratives than confronting them head on.

The exhibition is largely filled with Gen Z student-types who look absolutely delighted to be here. Most take a picture on their phones of every other thing they look at. It makes you wonder if phones should be banned. One young woman pretends to faint when she sees the dress from Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children. You commonly hear northern accents; thousands are clearly pilgrimaging to London from far away for this. In the ticket hall, stressed sellers are waving their arms at disappointed foreign visitors who haven’t seen the show is sold out for the near future.

“Some of the most surreal things are things that actually happen,” he pithily says in a video before you leave. It’s a fitting review of this exhibition. There could be a little more stimulation on offer with the inclusion of more life-size props, but in a way, you have to commend this straightforward, fuss-free testament to the great man’s incredible creative depth.

The World of Tim Burton runs at the Design Museum until 21 April 2025

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