Vincent (1982)

Vincent is a six-minute stop-motion short that Walt Disney Productions paid Tim Burton sixty thousand dollars to make in 1982, a decision history has treated kindly and the accountants presumably did not. Narrated in rhyming verse by Vincent Price, the boy's childhood idol, it follows seven-year-old Vincent Malloy through gothic daydreams borrowed from Edgar Allan Poe: the dog Abercrombie subjected to experiment, an aunt imagined in hot wax, a lost wife mourned in the manner of The Raven. Shot in stark black and white and steeped in 1920s German Expressionism, it is a mood piece and little else. The narrator supplies the only voice. The cast is, functionally, a child and a dog.

Those hunting for contemporary cultural instruction will find the cupboard bare. The mother appears briefly to dismiss her son's imagination and send him outdoors for some real fun. She is a plot device, not a thesis. The macabre imagery is grotesque by design and offers no affirming counter-narrative about the body. Race, class, sexuality, ecology, and the politics of representation go unaddressed, not through evasion but because a 1982 Disney animator making a Poe pastiche had other things on his mind. The film's only argument is that Vincent Price is magnificent, which is less a political position than a correct one. The meter does not twitch.

A curiosity, then, and a formative one: Burton's career in miniature, the outsider child, the gothic trappings, the affectionate borrowing from his betters. It took prizes at Chicago and Annecy, then disappeared into the Disney vault, resurfacing years later as a DVD bonus feature. As a document of progressive social consciousness it registers nothing whatsoever. Every dial reads zero, and the instrument is not malfunctioning. This is six minutes about a boy who wishes he were Vincent Price. It works.