TIM BURTON'S VINCENT

Hoy traigo una pequeña película de culto: el primer cortometraje de Tim Burton, titulado ‘Vincent’, de 1982 (bueno, en realidad es su segundo cortometraje, aunque de eso ya hablaremos luego). El caso es que aún faltaban tres años para que Burton debutara como director de su primer largo ‘La gran aventura de Pee-Wee’, en 1985. Y ya en Vincent se encuentran concentradas todas las esencias de Burton. ‘Pesadilla antes de Navidad’ o ‘La novia cadáver’ ya están presentes de algún modo en este corto. Incluso el delicioso libro de poemas infantiles que escribiera e ilustrara el propio Burton en 1997, ‘La melancólica muerte de Chico Ostra’.

La verdad es que la película resulta particularmente extraña principalmente por tres motivos: ser un CORTO DE ANIMACIÓN STOP-MOTION de 6 minutos de duración, en BLANCO Y NEGRO y en VERSO. Y atención, que ahora viene lo mejor:

¡La voz del narrador del film es la del único e inimitable VINCENT PRICE!
Nuff said!

Tanto si ya conocían el corto como si desconocían su existencia, damas y caballeros, les dejo con Vincent:

Vincent Malloy is seven years old.
He’s always polite and does what he’s told.
For a boy his age his considerate and nice,
but he wants to be just like Vincent Price.

He doesn’t mind living with his sister, dog and cats,
though he’d rather share a home with spiders and bats.
There he could reflect on the horrors he’s invented
and wander dark hallways alone and tormented.

Vincent is nice when his aunt comes to see him,
but imagines dipping her in wax for his wax museum.

He likes to experiment on his dog Abacrombie,
in the hopes of creating a horrible zombie.
So he and his horrible zombie dog
could go searching for victims in the London fog.

His thoughts though aren’t only of ghoulish crime,
he likes to paint and read to pass some of the time.
While other kids read books like ‘Go, Jane, Go’,
Vincent’s favourite author is Edgar Allan Poe.

One night while reading a gruesome tale,
he read a passage that made him turn pale.
Such horrible news he could not survive,
for his beautiful wife had been buried alive.

He dug out her grave to make sure she was dead,
unaware that her grave was his mother’s flower bed.

His mother sent Vincent off to his room.
He knew he’d been banished to the tower of doom,
where he was sentenced  to spend the rest of his live,
alone with a portrait of his beautiful wife.

While alone and insane, encased in his tomb,
Vincent’s mother burst suddenly into the room.
She said: ‘If you want to, you can go out and play.
It’s sunny outside and a beautiful day’.

Vincent tried to talk, but he just couldn’t speak.
The years of isolation had made him quite weak.
So he took out some paper, and scrawled with a pen:
‘I am possessed by this house, and can never leave it again’.

His mother said: ‘You are not possessed, and you are not almost dead.
These games that you play are all in your head.
You are not Vincent Price, you are Vincent Malloy.
You are not tormented or insane, you’re just a young boy’.

‘You are seven years old,  and you’re my son,
I want you to get outside and have some real fun’.

Her anger now spent, she walked out through the hall,
while Vincent backed slowly against the wall.
The room started to sway, to shiver and creak.
His horrid insanity  had reached it’s peak.

He saw Abacrombie, his zombie slave,
and heard his wife call from beyond the grave.
She spoke from her coffin and made ghoulish demands,
while through cracking walls reached skeleton hands.

Every horror in his life that had crept through his dreams
swept his mad laugh to terrified screams.
To escape the madness he reached for the door,
but fell limp and lifeless down on the floor.

His voice was soft and very slow,
as he quoted ‘The Raven’ from Edgar Allan Poe:

‘And my soul from out that shadow
that  lies floating on the door,
shall be lifted …
NEVERMORE!’

Como bonus, incluyo el auténtico primer cortometraje de Burton, el inacabado ‘Stalk of the Celery Monster’, que realizó en 1979 siendo un estudiante en California, de dos minutos de duración. Es la historia de un dentista poco ortodoxo. El corto estuvo perdido hasta el año 2006, en el que se pudieron juntar todos los fragmentos existentes, si bien algunos carecen de sonido y otros son meros bocetos a lápiz, mientras que la parte final es la que mejor se conserva, con sonido y color. Otra rareza sólo para burtonianos. Con todos ustedes, ‘Stalk of the Celery Monster’.