The Best Tim Burton Movies List

There are lots of popular filmmakers in the world, but few become a regular cottage industry. Herein lies the realm of Tim Burton, an animator turned director who began his career as a strange gothic iconoclast, but whose signature style helped bolster the modern Goth sensibility, pumping Hot Topics all over the world full of merchandise from Batman, The Nightmare Before Christmas and Alice in Wonderland.

But what of Tim Burton, the filmmaker? As his films have grown in box office popularity, his actual artistic stamp on motion picture storytelling is too often ignored. Tim Burton is the champion of the outsider, the lover of all things esoteric, who made rooting for the weirdo such a popular pastime that weirdos don’t even seem that weird anymore. He countered culture until he became the culture, and this week’s installment of The Best Movie Ever is here to celebrate that, just in time for the release of his best movie in 20 years, Big Eyes.

Best Tim Burton Movies List

So once again, we asked CraveOnline’s resident film critics William Bibbiani, Witney Seibold and Brian Formo to answer an unanswerable question: if you had to choose, what are The Best Tim Burton Movies Ever? Their answers may or may not surprise you, but you get to cast the deciding vote by picking your own favorite at the bottom of the page.

Come back next Wednesday for an all-new Best Movie Ever, and don’t forget to stay creepy.

Check Out: The Best Movie Ever: Trilogies

Witney Seibold’s Pick: Edward Scissorhands (1990)

Tim Burton has said – perhaps in jest, but at least partly seriously – that he can’t tell a good script from a bad script. He’s just more interested in storytelling as a phenomenon. And not the large kind of bold, ancient storytelling that Joseph Campbell talks about in in inflated mythology essays. Tim Burton is interested in fable. He likes quiet, wounded, magical creatures that find a winsome and childish form of freedom, usually through love. But then he’ll put those creatures in his own unique, bizarre world of black-and-white stripes, elongated fingers, and Goth Goth Goth; indeed, we would likely not have the Goth movement at all, had it not been for Tim Burton.

While conventional wisdom declares that Ed Wood is Burton’s best film – and it is most certainly his most intelligent and sophisticated movie, in addition to being a film I adore – for his best, I would rather select a film that exemplifies Burton’s personal art at its height; the film that represents his body of work the best. As such, I select Edward Scissorhands. This is a heart-rending, emotionally disarming fable about a machine boy – scissors for hands – played by Johnny Depp (who, at the time, was known more as a hunky heartthrob than your go-to weirdo) who lives alone in an abandoned hilltop castle bafflingly placed in the middle of a 1950s Burbank suburb. He is rescued by an Avon lady, and brought into the ultra-plastic world, entirely out of place. He falls in love with a local girl, too innocent to feel anything else. There is something indelibly honest about Edward’s childish emotional state. He is such a gentle soul, that caring for others seems to be the only thing he is capable of. And yet, he is shunned because he looks like a mechanical monster with weaponized fingers.

It’s an absurd premise, but Burton’s honest direction – not to mention Danny Elfman’s lullaby score – makes the film into a heartbreaking fable, an amazing spectacle, and a sweet, sweet film.

William Bibbiani’s Pick: Ed Wood (1994)

Although my love for The Nightmare Before Christmas knows no bounds, it’s not really “a Tim Burton movie.” It was directed by Henry Selick, and although it neatly encapsulates every little thing we’ve come to love about Tim Burton, I have to dismiss it for the purposes of this discussion. Fortunately, Tim Burton himself directed another film that neatly encapsulates every little thing we’ve come to love about him, and that film is Ed Wood.

Passion is a common motif in many stories, but passion for things that no one else gives a damn about is far less common. Ed Wood Jr., played with a golly-gee-whiz enthusiasm by Johnny Depp, loves movies, just like everyone else, but he also loves monsters, and in an era when they weren’t nearly as popular as they are now. He also loves angora sweaters, cross-dressing, and all of his misfit friends, each of whom would be kicked out of just about any other posse for being… well, losers. Even the great Bela Lugosi, played by Martin Landau, seems lucky to have Ed Wood as a friend. Wood only sees the good in people, and in movies, and in rejects and even in stock footage. He finds the beauty in everything. He just has no idea how to make a good film.

So he gets the gang together to make some films, gosh darned it, and although none of them have any talent whatsoever they just love doing it and bless them, they couldn’t stop if they tried. Ed Wood celebrates the love of art, even from people who don’t really know how to make it. Their enthusiasm is what matters, far more than their finished products, and through these characters Tim Burton finds something infinitely more human than you’ll find in most of his other films. Ed Wood is beautifully filmed, but it eschews the overt stylizations of Burton’s other movies because it doesn’t need to look weird in order to bring you into the filmmaker’s headspace. The whole point is to highlight the people who make the normal world weirder, and to celebrate them when… well, nobody else gives a crap. And he made us all care.

Brian Formo’s Pick: Ed Wood (1994)

Tim Burton has had a career unlike any other director. The main repeat throughout his entire career is his tenderness toward an outsider. His career was the most interesting when he himself was still an untrusted outsider. He made Batman too dark for Warner Brothers. He made Pee-Wee Herman fun for kids to watch, but kept him from being entirely approachable. He dropped horror into Christmas (over and over, actually) but it was a horror that wasn’t usually intended by the person bringing it (Jack Skellington and Edward Scissorhands; The Penguin certainly relished it, though).

But Burton’s best portraits of an outsider were both outsider Edwards, both played by Johnny Depp. What launches Ed Wood above Edward Scissorhands is that Burton lands his dismount with an absolutely perfect ending. In 1994, Burton had lost the Batman franchise that he was given the keys to. The suits weren’t entirely comfortable with his peculiar sensibilities and penchant for dark humor. Ed Wood was a loving portrait of another such director, but one who was never handed the keys to anything. Ed Wood, Jr. (Depp) was someone who wrote and directed his own peculiar, far-reaching films (sometimes in a woman’s cashmere sweater) that he needed to make so badly that he and his crew would get baptized to get monetary blessings from whatever church offered it.

To Burton, it doesn’t matter that Wood would later be considered the “worst director who ever lived” (hardly). What matters is that he set out to make escapist movies, and he made them the best he was capable of doing. And some of the moments he’d later be ridiculed for, for instance when the squat, brick wall detective (George “The Animal” Steele) runs into a doorframe and shakes the set, Wood brushes off the need for a reshoot because he sees it as realistic. He explains with a more humane perspective than anyone who relishes labeling people the worst this, worst that, could ever muster. “He’d probably have to struggle with that every day,” he says.

All of his characters have things that they struggle with every day: Bela Lugosi (Martin Landau) struggles with a drug addiction, Vampira (Lisa Marie) struggles with harassment, Criswell (Jeffrey Jones) struggles with clairvoyance, Bunny Breckinridge (Bill Murray) struggles with his gender reassignment. Wood struggles only with getting his ideas out there into the world. With Orson Welles (Vincent D’Onofrio) offering words of wisdom to Wood in Ed Wood, Burton, too, seems to agree that “visions are worth fighting for. Why spend your life making someone else’s dreams?”

Let us know what you consider to be the best Tim Burton movies ever in the comment section below!

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