If you've ever even been slightly curious about Tim Burton, that ultimate disconsolate son of suburbia who's been inviting us into his gleefully bent movie worlds for 27 years now, rest assured your interest will be sated by the show dedicated to the director at the Museum of Modern Art. Opening on November 22nd, it is an almost ludicrously complete assemblage of Burtoniana.

Just about everything one could think of has been matted and framed, up to and including the nascent director's adolescent doodles and prize-winning poster ideas. The director gave the museum curators the full run of his house and assorted papers; they turned up such early gems as a hand-written high school paper titled "Humor In America" ("Types of jokes I've heard and seen: Pollock [sic] jokes (ethnic jokes), Knock-knock jokes, Insults, Stories, One liners, Elephant jokes, Puns...") and this anti-litter poster, which adorned garbage collection trucks in Burton's native Burbank, California, after he won a Keep Burbank Beautiful competition.

A lot of the drawings on display date from the time Burton spent working at Disney, just after attending CalArts. Apparently, while animating such projects as The Fox And The Hound, Burton found he needed a less treacly creative outlet, and badly: most of the sketches from this period betray a mordant sense of humor and the same dark view of humankind that he would later explore in his feature films. Strangely, these images whipsaw between the grim and the twee. Men and women are portrayed as gothic grotesques, or the drawings hinge on kind of sweet little visual puns: a stringy-haired, football-headed woman tugging a string between both ears gets the caption MENTAL FLOSS, for example. Another drawing features two bunny rabbits with baskets of eggs, one saying to the other, "We've been telling the kids the story of Christ all these years...Well, I think they're old enough now to know what Easter's really all about."

The gallery is crammed with material. (Evidently the excavations of Burton's home proved fruitful.) In addition to the sketches and the high school coursework, there are sculptures — seven of which, in the museum courtyard, Burton made specially for the show — movie props, costumes, posters, Polaroids, and assorted notes such as would please the most dedicated connoisseur of arcana. In one corner, Burton's 1983 adaptation of Hansel and Gretel — screened by the Disney channel exactly once — plays. In it, a Japanese brother and sister outsmart a wicked witch with candy cane rhinoplasty who lives in a house that looks like a quivering, pink tongue. There's also a gingerbread man character who talks to Hansel even as he eats him up. "If you think I'm tasty, and you want my body, come on take another bite," taunts the pastry, to the rhythm of "If You Think I'm Sexy."

Visitors enter the exhibit through an immense mouth that hangs, red carpet-tongue extended; in the black-and-white striped corridor behind, Burton's animated shorts play on flat screens. (At the other end, presumably somewhere in the gallery's stomach, is a room lit by UV light, where Burton's blacklight paintings on velvet are displayed.) It is a curatorial choice that seems to cleave to the crowd-pleasing side of things. It's anyone's guess why the curators thought Burton's work needed such a loud proclamation of its difference from typical museum fare as a jagged-tooth orifice; it looks like the sort of thing one might encounter at an amusement park ride.

The man himself described the process of having his work turned out for display as "surreal" and "an out-of-body experience." He remembered to thank the exhibition sponsor, the ridiculously renamed SyFy — "I'm a sci-fi kinda guy" — only at the very last second.

The exhibit includes a life-sized statue of Johnny Depp as Edward Scissorhands, as well as this sketch of the character.

Artifacts from Beetlejuice include this sculpture, a yellowed copy of The Afterlife newspaper ("ECTOPLASM LEAK AT PLANT NUMBER 9" "EXORCISM RATE SOARS"), and Burton's own hand-written notes about the project, which compare it to that other well-known "extreme four character conflict," Who's Afraid Of Virginia Woolf. In the nearby Mars Attacks section, there are latex severed heads and a gigantic painting of Martian anatomy. Sweeney Todd has a wooden box and an engraved set of cutthroat razors.

Batman is represented by various latex cowls, and Batman Returns merits the inclusion of Michelle Pfeiffer's whipstitched catsuit.

In a class composition Burton completed on September 27, 1974, at the age of 16, he imbued an ordinary trip to the doctor for a checkup and a tetanus shot with a sense of heavy foreboding. "There was a ghoulish smile on his face," wrote Burton, "like he enjoyed sticking the needle in my arm."

Tim Burton has stuck the needle in the moviegoing public's arm for nearly 30 years — by the looks of this show, thoroughly enjoying himself in the process. Long may he continue.

Tim Burton At MoMA [MoMA]

[Image via Oh! My God! I Miss You ]

[Los Angeles, January 29. Image via Bauer-Griffin]

There's no pretence with us, you see....'Well, [Burton] was all [during the making of Sweeney]: (growls) How difficult is it to come through the door and cover that spot!' And I'd be (whines): 'I've got wool in my head because I'm fucking pregnant, and there's blood everywhere and I didn't see it, all right?' And all I get is: "Action!"

We haven't got a passageway [connecting the two homes] - we've just got a room ...between the two. And to me it makes complete sense: if you've got some money, and you can afford it, why not have your own space? It really is a great idea. You never have to compromise emotionally or feel invaded....I'm surprised when people find it weird, to be honest. It's not even that separate, really - it just looks like a quite big, strange house. And there's a sense of choice about things - you see each other when you want to.

Drop Dead Gorgeous [Guardian UK]

Mr. Burton's film adaptation of Mr. Sondheim's musical, is as dark and terrifying as any motion picture in recent memory, not excluding the bloody installments in the "Saw" franchise...It is cruel in its effects and radical in its misanthropy, expressing a breathtakingly, rigorously pessimistic view of human nature. It is also something close to a masterpiece...What you see is as dark as the grave. What you hear — some of the finest stage music of the past 40 years — is equally infernal, except that you might just as well call it heavenly.

As effectively overwrought and generally excellent as it is, Tim Burton's R-rated Sweeney Todd seems unlikely to be this year's Chicago or Dreamgirls....[T]he numbers are so inventively staged that two of [Helena] Bonham Carter's key songs—the cannibal waltz "A Little Priest" and the grotesquely wistful "By the Sea"—brought down the house...Possibly not since Vincente Minnelli has anyone directed a musical with such absolute mise-en-scéne.

Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street" was a bloody brilliant musical, featuring some of the most glorious melodies in American stage history and some of the most ferocious business. Homicide. Sadomasochism. Incest (sort of). Cannibalism. The kind of show where you go home humming the murders....What Tim Burton has done to Stephen Sondheim's 1979 show is tighten it, Gothify it, and heighten all the bloodletting that stagecraft can only imply...[Think] "Saw" with a ravaged, keening heart. This makes it harder to watch - and may turn it into that rarity, a commercial film whose target audiences cancel each other out - but it's a conceptual masterstroke. "Sweeney" always wanted to be a revenger's tragedy to make us recoil in fright. Now it is. Merry Christmas.

Admirers of Stephen Sondheim who have long wondered whether a film of distinction would ever be made from one of his stage musicals can put aside their skepticism: Tim Burton has accomplished it in his ravishing "Sweeney Todd"...Burton invites us into a more intimate communion with horrible yet hummable aspects of human nature....That integration has been carried out with remarkable suppleness so that the numbers seem, to a degree rarely experienced, an extension of character and plot. The success of Burton's technique even accrues beneficially to the performance of the extremely reedy-voiced Helena Bonham Carter, who makes of her Mrs. Lovett — Sweeney's cannibalistic comrade-in-harms — a woman less comical but virtually as poignant as the character Angela Lansbury created on Broadway 28 years ago.

Tim Burton's adaptation of Stephen Sondheim's masterpiece "Sweeney Todd" is a funny, moody musical blood bath. It's also notably cuter than its famous theatrical predecessors — which I guess is what happens when you cast Johnny Depp as the serial throat-slitter and Helena Bonham Carter as his cannibal pie-making accomplice....It's not entirely surprising that Burton's "Sweeney Todd" feels heavier on style than on substance — so much that the style almost subverts the story. Still, it's a gorgeous artifact and pretty enjoyable in all.

It's not the volume of the blood that distinguishes "Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street" from every other film this year. The shocker is the context. Movie audiences aren't used to seeing throats slit while the leading character sings a song—Stephen Sondheim's stealthy, quietly obsessive counter-melody to "Johanna"—and then, in methodical succession, dumps the corpses down a makeshift slide into a cellar where the bodies collected are ground, slowly, into meat pie filling....The other shocker: The film's really good.