Looking For Meaning in Tim Burton's Movies | An Analysis

Thanks for thoroughly ruining my childhood

less than 2 minutes in and i’m so happy to see someone have the same feelings on beetlejuice as me omg. i watched it way late when i was 20 and i was like….. there is 0 charm to this foul man i cannot stomach this and i turned it off 5 minutes after the titular juice showed up

Beetlejuice isn’t a good guy, he is funny but it’s the “bland” people and young Winona Ryder that makes the movie.

Your Ed Wood critique was great

Not sure. But if you asked Lynch and Waters, they may say you’re being a bit nit picky .

The early Burton is supposed to be white. That’s who is being made fun of

Pretty sure beetlgeuse is supposed to be seen as bad. Funny but bad

Nightmare Before Christmas is an awful movie too. It's essentialist garbage, telling kids that some people have a pre-determined roles to play in society, and that nothing good comes from straying from those roles, regardless of their dedication or good intentions.

I like the movie Beetlejuice, but yeah, the character is a piece of shit. The movie acknowledges this a couple of times, mostly through the case worker.

I’m sorry but to say that “reading” on Edward Scissorhands is a “stretch” is beyond an understatement… it’s positively delusional

Please don’t ever say anything against Edward Scissorhands again.

Tim Burton's films are pretty shallow overall. His artistic interests seem to be purely aesthetic. He wants to create a specific "look", and that's about it.

The fact that his visual style is unconventional seems to have (foolishly) gained him the reputation of being an iconoclast. He's not. He's just a guy who really digs goofy Gothic costumes and set design.

As a director, he has no more artistic integrity than Michael Bay, or Jerry Bruckheimer.

L8be you

Beetlejuice is funny BECAUSE he's creepy, you sound like an easily triggered feminist.

Beetlejuice is still one of my favorite movies 😂
I was young when it came out but yeah… I like it still and love that it sneaked an F-Bomb into a rated PG movie 🥳😜

Beetle Juice terrified me as a child

For me, i enjoyed the movie Beetlejuice a lot. The character Beetlejuice was meant to be creepy and borderline unlikable, i thought.

Issues, hes got issues.😂😂

Ha putting Tim Burton’s movies next to Lynch and Waters really gives some quick prospective.

Maggie, it's understandable that you may dislike Beetlejuice's shock jock character given you are a millennial you miss the obvious satire of the time. In the 80's Reagan era, respectability politics, etiquette and capitalism was at an all time high. Beetlejuice is the antithesis of the 80's yuppy culture. Taking Beetlejuice seriously is missing the point. He is the personification of the real personality people we're masking at the time. Please watch the 80's cartoon of the same name to get a PC version of what Burton was trying to say and he wasn't sleeping with Lydia. She's 15 and he's dead. Its a cartoon for goodness sake.

Just watching this and UGH, guess I'm watching all your work 😍😵

Who ever said Beetlegeuse was a likable character?

*groan*, another obnoxious female "content creator" shitting on Tim Burton because his 80s and 90s films don't satisfy her 2010/2020s politics.

Nostalgia is not a time or a place.
It is chasing the dragon of how something made you feel at least ONCE.
But just because something made you feel a certain way ONCE doesn't make it always work like that. While your nostalgia will definitely insist it always will.

if you can't get past beetlejuice's energy, you are a prude.

lmao the progressive outrage of this video is hysterical

Beetlejuice is Frank Burns.

I didnt even realize Lydia was depressed and suicidal till i was older and also myself depressed and suicidal 🫥🫥 like?? It was just very vague to me as a kid

This video was fucking amazing, I haven't felt this way in a long time ngl, thank u, fr, loved it

He is a demon

his movies do this thing where they have hints of meaning but its pretty vauge and stripped of any context so people can enjoy the movie without any hard hitting societal critisism or people can grasp at the nothings to fabricate their own meaning.

I really liked your Johnny Depp impression.

Wait I feel like I am about to repost a comment I said before but having the actor who played Otho in Beetlejuice (Glenn Shadix), who had survived gay conversion electroshock therapy and a suicide attempt that put him in a coma for three days, deliver that snide line about people commiting suicide becoming civil servants seems disgustingly sadistic.

This was awful. Just awful. I’m SO glad that this terrible mess wasn’t the first video that I watched from this channel, otherwise I would’ve probably never given it a second look again. Even going by your other film analysis from this time, this one is just horrible. Its deeply insulting, sarcastic, lazy, and seems to be WAY more interested with making bizarre leaps in thinking to take low blows and potshots at Burton as a person. A LOT moreso than actually, honestly engaging with or critically analyzing any of his movies.

Its whiplash inducing just how wild and deluded all of your readings of his movies become the more and more that I went into this video, just some shockingly bad stuff quite frankly. I have no idea what the hell Back To The Future 2 was doing in here. I have no idea why or how or what got you to the conclusion that Edward Scissorhands was a celebration of SEGREGATION??!!!! You think that a “sexually liberated housewife” is an accurate description for a woman’s sexual assault of Edward Scissorhands in that same damn movie. There’s this absurd through line connection with Ronald Regan that you desperately wanted to establish and cling onto like a LIFERAFT throughout this video because. . . . .candy and a movie kind of like Indiana Jones that he starred in?? WHAT????? Just all of it, every last bloody second os this miserable video essay, was some of the worst, most poorly thought out and researched film ‘analysis’ that I have ever seen in my LIFE.

It absolutely makes sense to me why this was your first and thankfully LAST film analysis that tackled movies based on how much your Twitter followers enjoyed them (for some reason???). Without really thinking that much about/doing that much research on those movies PRIOR to locking yourself into making a video essay about them. Regardless of my own feelings about Tim Burton, I am very surprised that you haven’t (at least) delisted this video at some point by now. As literally every single other one of your film analyses have WAY better analysis in them, than this dumpster fire does. You are so, so, SO much better of a media analyst than this individual video essay paints you as. (Seriously, not even an UPDATED version of this shitstorm taking all of the many, MANY other criticisms in this comment section alone into account?? REALLY Maggie????)

I haven’t seen Beetlejuice for decades, I only remember that it was kind of zany and that the most the spirits could do to effect the world of the living also mildly entertained the people. I like Edward Scissor Hands and have watched it many times, I had tried to find any semblance of meaning in it but it is so contradictory and nonsensical that I gave up trying to find meaning. It’s entertaining. It seems like the very deliberate choices made by Burton would add up to something, but it all ends up being nonsense. Entertaining nonsense, but nonsense nevertheless. Same goes with the Corpse Bride and Nightmare Before Christmas. You would think these would be criticisms of consumption-as-a-holiday or of ridged social norms making people miserable, but they just sort of point out these things without any real commentary.

Fish’s analysis doesn’t always hit the mark, but aside from some fun movies, Burton is an uneven artist at best. While he is usually visually interesting, he is ultimately pretty mainstream, like Fish says.

I'd be curious to know your take on "Drop Dead Fred." A woman I was dating insisted that I watch it so I could understand her. The film had a point to make about the effects of childhood abuse but the main character came off as recklessly destructive with no empathy for people who hadn't been abused. We broke up a few months later.

Punk got so punk that it had to punk out punk.

Beetlejuice got whitewashed by the cartoon in the same way robocop did... the 80's/early 90's was a particularly wierd time, where extremely vulgar films that were popular with adults were viewed only for their earning potential, and thus turned into "family friendly" franchaises that could sell toys. That doesnt however mean that the source material was ever actually family friendly. I can remember as a kid being totally creeped out by beetlejuice... he was after all a bad guy in his own movie.

i like how you call beetlejuice "rapey" for kissing people when he meets them, and wanting to marry someone to come back to life. but a woman LITERALY sexually assaulting a mentally and physically handicapped man with the mind of a child and then trying to shame him for not fucking her and make him into a villain and call HIM a rapist? well according to you shes just "sexually liberated". what the fuck is it with you feminazi cunts? a woman is a rapist, and its okay, a man is flirtatious and hes a rapist?

and you do this kind of shit in ALL of your videos. you talk shit about men, and any man who flirts with a woman is a misogynist and hates women, like what the fuck? who hurt you, and you were so weak that you just said "meh im gonna make it my life goal to just try and beat down men in any way i can!"? you DESPERATELY need to grow the fuck up and enter the real world, not your closed off feminazi fantasy.

🐠❤️

Moral crusade masquerading as film criticism.

Not to mention that bad-take on Edward Scissorhands. A terrible, IdPol-poisoned bad take.

Doesn't bill Murray like Harry belefonte in stripes? Might have been some other musician

This was a significantly narrow-minded and disingenuous take on Burton’s filmography and is absolutely filled to the brim with bad faith criticism.

For me, you didn't ruin my childhood because my sisters and I grew up in a family of prejudice, racist, homophobic people who all had mental illnesses (and they think Ronald Reagan was the best president we had until Trump), so my sisters and I learned from the get-go that the movies were fun and colorful and "sweet" but clearly not perfect and definitely messed up. We liked characters like Beetlejuice because he was wacky and yes, we knew he was a messed up guy. Just like hoe we find things we love and enjoy that make life fun despite knowing how messed up the world is. It's all about being realistic about the world yet still wanting to try to enjoy life; a sort of perfect balance of negative and positive which is why we found ourselves loving these movies. So, I 100% agreed with your commentary, yet I still cite loving Beetlejuice and Nightmare Before Christmas and the art Tim does because I like weird things. Honestly, nothing is really ever going to perfect, so if you can find something you like in this messed up world I say enjoy it even if it's flawed.

"sexy housewife" is a predator