Halloween 2017 - Beetlejuice

Boy this was a ton of fun to work on. I think this is my personal favorite of this year's Halloween event. Not that I didn't like the other pieces, but this one in particular felt like I was having complete freedom and total control over the drawing. Sometimes the program wrestles me, or there's a rowdy layer that wants to fight me, or there's an issue with the shading or the line art, but in this case everything flowed perfectly and all the pieces fell right into place. This one reminded me of when I was working on Movie Slate's update for "Paprika" and how much fun it was to blend the dream with reality in that picture. I want to do more surreal pieces in the future. They are kind of fun!

There's a lot I could say about "Beetlejuice", but I think the one thing I should say first is that it's my personal favourite Tim Burton movie and one of my favorite movies of all time. I remember watching it as a kid and being fascinated with the horror and fantasy elements of it as well as being mildly disturbed by it. That's the best part of some of Burton's early work. He knew real well how to make the weirdness in his movies feel familiar and welcoming without taking any sense of threat away. Watching it now as an adult I can appreciate the creativity behind the making of it, and how interesting its structure and set up is. Very rarely do we get horror movies where we see things from the perspective of the ghosts, and we see how they have to deal with the after life and what's it like. I love the production design and the make up in this movie, and how it walks that fine line between cartoon and body horror. I'd consider this one of the most relevant movies made in the 80's, right up there with "Who Framed Roger Rabbit?" and "The Princess Bride", all of them movies that marked a generation.

Now as for the cartoon, well, I'm quite torn up about it. I wasn't surprised they made a cartoon out of it, though to be perfectly honest I kind of gave up on it a couple of episodes after. Don't get me wrong, it still captured the spirit of the film but some of the set ups felt recycled. I remember watching it as a kid and not getting as invested as I was in the movie. To me it felt like any other cartoon on TV. While the movie was so unique and distinctive when adapting cartoon logic into a live action film, the cartoon just played it straight and that made all that uniqueness blend in. That intro is still one of the most mind bending moments of my childhood, though. I liked it enough that I based this drawing around it.

"Beetlejuice" is a movie that serves as a perfect example of why Tim Burton remains as one of the most imaginative directors of our time, while also providing good intense fun with effects that have managed to age fairly well, a contagious rhythm and a memorable and unique aesthetic that no other movie has managed to recreate to this day. "Beetlejuice" the cartoon, while not as groundbreaking as the movie, still remains an enjoyable show that completionists of Burton will enjoy.