Edward Scissorhands Review

Edward Scissorhands – Review

Figure 1. Edward struggling with the suburban lifestyle (c1990)

 Edward Scissorhands is a movie released in 1990, directed by Tim Burton. It is about a boy with scissors for hands who gets found by a lady who takes him into her home and tries to integrate him into a suburban household. Once found he is brought back to the family house and the family adopts him. The boy has difficulties adapting as he constantly accidentally breaks things around the household or cuts his own face with the sharp scissors he has for hands “Edward is a hazard, slicing gashes in his chalky face every time he wipes away a stray hair” (Travers, 1990:2) but is very popular with the neighbourhood. After a while, his innocence gets taken advantage of and the very people he trusted start manipulating him which slowly escalates. Late in the movie Edward’s clumsiness with his hands causes him to accidentally lacerate the young boy of the family who adopted him. He then flees back to his own home followed by an angry mob of suburban villagers in a scene similar to the finale of Frankenstein.

The theme of the movie is about being different and acceptance.  This is shown in the colours, shapes, people and general feel and atmosphere. The village is portrayed in pastel colours that have a bubble gum look demonstrating perhaps an exaggerated stereotype of the typical American suburban family and their lives. Edward’s castle on the other hand is in black and white which is in contrast to the colourful village illustrating perhaps a difference in their lifestyles with Edward being secluded and alone while the villagers lead very mainstream social lives of the happy family in American suburbia.

 The movie also employs the use of shapes, for example the village houses are all bungalows which have the same box shape with a square garden and garage “They live, in Avon-like propriety, within the portals of well-ordered houses that look like boxes of cosmetics. They are pastel pink and blue and green, and very, very neat.” (Malcolm, 1991:2) while Edwards mansion is much bigger, has stories and every wall is crooked which ones again tells the difference between them. Perhaps showing the differences in upbringing, lifestyle and culture between Edward and the suburban families.

 Another example would be Edward’s hands, the director could have chosen anything but he went for very dangerous looking scissors which look out of place, a bit like Edward himself. These scissors are also the vessel for his talents in creating beautiful works of art. “Meanwhile, Edward finds himself a local celebrity after the town realizes that his talents include creative hedge trimming and an unrivaled ability to cut hair.” (Thompson, Unknown:2) His hair, which is black and messy also stands in a high contrast to the villagers, perhaps physically demonstrating the difference between them to the viewer.

  

The movie plays heavily on stereotypes. The villagers all have a very typically American suburban lifestyle which is expressed in the same house shapes, same male lifestyle, every family having one dog and one car and all the housewives meet up at the corner to gossip, the village has one god fearing girl that plays hymns and warns everyone about the disaster to come, their excitement and later disgust about everything different.  

 The movie ends when Edward gets chased by the mob of angry villagers back to his home in a very familiar Frankenstein like scene perhaps portraying that such diversity between neighbours is difficult to overcome. “As in Burton's other films (Pee-wee's Big Adventure, Beetlejuice and Batman), the outsider soon becomes the outcast, and the laughs are soon tinged with melancholy.” (Travers, 1990:2). The overall theme and conclusion of the movie seems to be the cycle of acceptance and rejection that eventually occurs in others movies made by Tim Burton and plays on the sympathy of the audience to the hero’s plight.

Illustration List

Figure 1:  Burton, Tim (1990) Edward struggling with the suburban lifestyle [Still of Edward Scissorhands] Available from: http://theironcupcake.wordpress.com/2012/05/30/indelible-film-images-edward-scissorhands/ (accessed on 10/11/2014)

Bibliography

Travers, Peter. (December 1990) Edward Scissorhands. http://www.rollingstone.com/movies/reviews/edward-scissorhands-19901214 (accessed on 10/11/2014)

Malcolm, Derek. (July 1991) Edward Scissorhands. http://www.theguardian.com/film/News_Story/Critic_Review/Guardian_review/0,,558617,00.html (accessed on 10/11/2014)

Thompson, Caroline. (Unknown) Edward Scissorhands – Movie Info. http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/edward_scissorhands/  (accessed on 10/11/2014)

Maya Alley Lamp Post

After great difficulties with the bevel tool I managed to push on and get on with the lamp post in my old alley scene and hope for lots more progress this week!

Floor pattern draft for my city

The important thing about the floor is, that no shape is like another so using the polygonal lasso tool and brush I crated these crazy shapes!

What If Metropolis Review 1

Kandinsky's What if Metropolis Review 1

Life Drawing 5th of November

This was my first "draw a naked person" lesson and we used different techniques to get a grip of it with the last few pictures having to be a continuous line within one or two minutes. I have certainly learned a lot this lesson and might be able to go a bit more relaxed into the next one!

About Wassily Kandinsky

Wassily Kandinsky

Kandinsky (1866, Moscow - 1944, Paris) was a pioneer of the abstract. He used mainly oil on canvas, paint on glass, watercolours and woodcuts to express his art. Even though he was born in Russia he spend most of his life in Germany, but also lived in Russia and France.

His auntie made him take music and art lessons from a young age and he studied Law and Economy at university and later painting. His artistic beginnings were mainly landscapes where he looked closely at nature and Germanic- Slavic folk art and fairy tales which inspired him to his woodcuts. Being born in Moscow, many elements of his inspiration still stem from Russia and are carried into his works.

His road down to the abstract is a slow and consistent one as Kandinsky starts with studies of how nature looks like but he never seems to want to actually replicate it, he takes the shapes and colours and forms them into a painting which resembles nature in some ways, but doesn’t look like it. Over the run of the years his paintings move further away from the original scenes and he takes the shapes but puts them together in a completely different order, adds colour a bit more sparingly and lets the background colour of the canvas shine through a lot.

When he joins the Bauhaus, which mainly concentrates on architecture and objects that have multiple uses or at least have their usefulness maximised, he pushes his style further towards rigid forms with colours assigned to forms, and they hardly ever mix or go over the lines.

A theme that is presented throughout his life is his desire to draw music, which he achieves by using wavy and smooth lines for calm music and rigid straight lines with pointy corners for blasty, loud and sudden parts of a piece.

In 1911 he founds a group called “Blaue Reiter” with Franz Marc and he is the first artist to have a one – man exhibition which takes place in Munich. He is a professor at the Bauhaus (the higher school of construction and art designing) in Berlin and later Dessau after it has to move because of the Nazi movement.

Being a theorist as well as professor and artist he writes the pieces “Concerning the Spiritual in Art” (Über das Geistige in der Kunst, 1910) and “Point and Lane to Plane” (Punkt und Linie zu Flaeche, 1926), both originals are written in German.

His late works mostly consist of precise, geometrical forms inspired by Bauhaus and in 1933 he moves to Paris, where he lives until his death in 1944.

The What If Metropolis - Influence Map

These are Kandinsky's works that have influenced me most regarding colour, shapes and structures and thanks to Phil I might be able to draw music soon!