Tim Burton and the making of a haven for weirdos

For free real time breaking news alerts sent straight to your inbox sign up to our breaking news emails Sign up to our free breaking news emails Sign up to our free breaking news emails SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. This woman – a corpse bride, you might say – is all over The Design Museum’s blockbuster Burton exhibition, drawn across the decades in sketchbooks and on hotel stationery, on napkins and in tear-away notepads. He likes his sister and his dog and his cats, but he’d rather be hanging out with spiders and bats.” open image in gallery Tim Burton and curator Maria McLintock survey a ‘Corpse Bride’ maquette at the Design Museum’s new Burton exhibition Vincent and the majority of Burton’s feature films are explored in the new exhibition, which gathers together costumes, props and ephemera from his early life and 40-plus years in cinema. “I never really targeted anything, and was always surprised whenever kids or adults or anybody liked it.” open image in gallery ‘Surrounded’, a Tim Burton painting on display at his London exhibition Though he avoided outright regret over any projects, Burton did nod to his creative fallow years, suggesting he feels “re-energised” in the wake of the back-to-back creative and commercial hits that were Wednesday and his Beetlejuice sequel. If The World of Tim Burton reminds us of anything, it’s that the filmmaker is one of our greatest living talents – a man whose unconventional approach to storytelling and design became so unusually popular that it became easy to take him for granted.