There’s something comforting in Tim Burton using stop-motion animation to tell the chilling story of a long-dead, misguided young student in the new season of Wednesday. As every fan of The Nightmare Before Christmas or his creepy-crawly creatures from Beetlejuice already knows, the filmmaker has a long history with the format. What might surprise even his most ardent followers, however, is just how far back this obsession goes. Like the Netflix series about Jenna Ortega’s macabre young sleuth Wednesday Addams, its origins trace back to Burton’s own school days.
Back then, another Adams—this one with just one d—gave Burton his first stop-motion camera. Mrs. Doris Adams was a middle-aged art teacher at Burbank High School when she first encountered young Tim, who kept to himself and filled his notebooks with weird but endearing creatures.
“Oh, I loved her,” Burton tells Vanity Fair in an exclusive interview. “You know what? In [all my] years of going to school, I maybe had two or three teachers that helped me in any way, but she was one of the main ones. She just let me be who I was, which was so important. Honestly, I’ll never forget her for that.”
Mrs. Adams, who died at age 96 in 2018, followed Burton’s work for the rest of her life. One day, she brought in a camera that could create the illusion of motion one frame at a time. “We had a little Super 8 thing, and one of the first things I did was make a little crawling eye, a brain with an eye, and some pipe-cleaner tentacles that were fighting, uhh…I think it was a pair of pliers,” Burton says. “I just liked the tactile nature of it. It was always kind of fun to see it come to life, even crudely.”
From those rudimentary beginnings, Burton kept studying. He loved the handcrafted feel of the puppets and the way they moved, like when stop-motion legend Ray Harryhausen had a live-action actor battle a group of skeleton warriors. “The first movie I ever remember seeing was Jason and the Argonauts. So I was a stop-motion fan from the very beginning of my life. And I grew up with the Rankin and Bass [shows], like Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer,” Burton says.
It may be no wonder that his greatest accomplishment in the format so far was a fusion of holidays in 1993’s The Nightmare Before Christmas, his now classic collaboration with director Henry Selick. But even long before that, Burton was hooked on stop-motion.
He studied the process at CalArts as an animation student. As a Disney apprentice, he made 1982’s Vincent, a stop-motion tale told in rhyme about a young boy who is obsessed with horror-movie icon Vincent Price. (Price himself agreed to narrate it.) Stop-motion helped bring to life a memorable weirdo from his first feature, Pee-wee’s Big Adventure (“Tell ’em Large Marge sent ya!”) as well as the otherworldly monstrosities of 1988’s Beetlejuice. He later made stop-motion features The Nightmare Before Christmas, Corpse Bride, and Frankenweenie, based on his own 1984 short.
After launching Wednesday for Netflix in 2022, Burton turned again to stop-motion for his feature film Beetlejuice Beetlejuice. In truth, it seems to be a part of virtually everything he does. Then Wednesday creators Alfred Gough and Miles Millar leaned into that. When they gave the director their scripts for season two of the series, the first installment featured a sequence critics have hailed as “gorgeous,” “classically Burtonian,” and the “biggest surprise” of season two.
In the opening episode, titled “Here We Woe Again,” Wednesday Addams’s oft tormented little brother, Pugsley (Isaac Ordonez), enrolls at Nevermore Academy and learns some school lore. It’s the story of a long-gone former student and a strange landmark in the woods known as the Skull Tree.
As the flashback begins, we shift from live-action to stop-motion. Pugsley learns about an unnamed telekinetic boy who suffered from a “fragile heart” that he replaced with metallic clockwork that kept him alive, but made him “cold and driven by ambition.” He was considered one of the most brilliant students in Nevermore history, but his inventions became increasingly dangerous. Finally, an explosion in his laboratory in one of the school clocktowers abruptly ended the genius boy’s life. (His natural life, at least.)
His body was buried at the base of the Skull Tree, a split trunk with hollows that look like empty eye sockets. Later, Pugsley finds the tree—and his ability to channel electricity reactivates the heart and reanimates the body of the deceased student. That’s how a zombie named Slurp becomes part of Wednesday’s season two storyline.
To properly depict the flashback, Burton went back to his own school days. “I said, ‘Guys, we’ve got to go back. I don’t want this to be too slick,’” Burton says. “I wanted to make this like it’s a student project. It’s a student telling the story, so I wanted it to feel a bit rougher. It was important to have that kind of crude, simplistic look.”
He recruited the animation house Mackinnon & Saunders, which had collaborated with Burton previously on Corpse Bride and Frankenweenie, to oversee the production of the scene. Burton wasn’t afraid to get hands-on developing the look of the boy with the mechanical heart. “I sculpted a little clay head that was pretty bad,” he says. “And because these guys are so good, they were kind of like, ‘Really…?’”
But the object illustrated the folk-art style he was going for—a loosely whittled face, which he studded with jagged wires for hair. “That was the vibe. It was like kids made this,” Burton says.
He also wanted the flashback to be sketchy on the details, the way many urban legends draw their power from the blanks that the listeners (or viewers) fill in themselves. “It’s being told to you, so it leaves it a bit vague and leaves it sort of unknown and mysterious,” he says.
Burton sought to rough up electrical effects that were added digitally to the footage. “It was looking too slick,” he says. “So I just sort of broke it up a little bit, because sometimes you could see the difference between what’s stop-motion and what’s an added effect.”
The explosion in the clock tower was done in-camera, using glycerin gel that was backlit to look like flames. Burton asked the animating team to make everything look like found objects, telling them: “‘Pretend that you don’t have money,’ which was kind of true.”
The Skull Tree itself calls back to Burton’s filmography, which is populated by a lot of twisted vegetation. A psychologist might be able to draw a line from it to his childhood in Burbank, growing up in a cracker-box house in the relatively new suburb of Los Angeles.
“The only difference is there are now big trees there, where back in the day it was a bit more sparse suburbia,” he says. “There weren’t many big trees in the neighborhood.”
But in Burton’s new neighborhoods, there are always ominous shadows from the branches above.
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