Tim Burton on the set of Sweeney Todd Peter Mountain/Courtesy of DreamWorks

"I was a terrible animator. I punched my timecard all the time. I never managed to draw a cute fox," he confesses, recalling that it was a "really bad time" at Disney. "There were amazing people there: John Lassiter, Brad Bird, Leon Schlesinger — all these people there not doing anything. And it was just right before the boom started to happen."

Burton believes "all these people who could have been doing amazing work" were oppressed because they were working through a bad period in Disney's history.

"I started out working as an animator on The Fox and the Hound, and luckily I was just so bad at it. I learned how to fall asleep at my desk with a pencil." he says, though he admits that a certain lack of direction allowed him to work on other projects. "I had a lot of free time on my hands during which they just let me do anything, so it was a really productive time for me."

He got the opportunity to do design work and began to write and develop his first major animated feature, The Nightmare Before Christmas. Burton directed a couple of short films, Vincent and Frankenweenie, which then caught the eye of actor Paul Reubens, who selected Burton to direct Pee-Wee's Big Adventure, a film made for $7 million that grossed over $40 million.

The success of Pee-Wee made it possible for Burton to move onto bigger projects and allowed him to explore new computer-generated special-effects developments — those, for instance, that he employed in the horror-comedy Beetlejuice.

"You have to admit," Burton says of his early use of CGI, "that they were some of the worst you have ever seen. That was part of that: We didn't have a lot of money, and we just kind of did it the old fashioned way. And I kind of miss that. I still try to do that. I always try to do things as much live as I can — it helps the actors; it helps the people who are actually on the set doing it."

TACKLING THE CAPED CRUSADER
Though comics were only "a little bit" of his childhood, Burton was handed the Batman franchise. He did, however, have a particular affinity for the Caped Crusader over other comic heroes.

"Batman was my favorite because I liked that world — it took place at night," he says. "I grew up on the TV show [but]…I had trouble reading comics. I don't know if I had a slight dyslexia or whatever, but I did have trouble figuring which line I should read first in the comics. But I certainly loved Batman and that world and all the characters most of all."

Although Burton famously clashed with the film's producers over the casting of Michael Keaton in the lead role, he says the main ground rules given to him were to make it successful.