The Tim Burton exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art was lots of fun, although it was clausterphobically crowded. It took a fair amount of determination and patience to see every piece in the show, but it was worth it. It’s 5 or 6 rooms crammed with sketches, storyboards, notes, character studies, maquettes, props and other goodies.

At one point I got hemmed into a corner, although to be fair it was a good corner – filled with storyboards from Nightmare Before Christmas. I’m quite intimately familiar with those sketches now.

After I escaped that corner, I almost immediately found myself wedged in next to one of the fantastic scarecrows from Sleepy Hollow. It’s probably my favorite Tim Buron movie so I was okay with that. It was also an excellent vantage point to watch the reactions of the Tim-Wannabee Boys as they randomly encountered one another.

The carefully coiffed and dyed guys in their Tim Circa-1993 uniforms looked like they’d escaped from a casting call. They’d be bouncing around, clutching their sketchbooks tightly and trying to look cool even though this was the moment they’d been waiting their whole 25 or 30 years for. Then, something awful would happen. The crowd would surge hither or yon and they’d suddenly find themselves nose to nose with another Tim-Wannabee Art Skool Boy.

You know how Siamese Fighting Fish placed next to one another in their little bowls get all puffed up and agitated? The same thing happens when you place Tim-Wannabee Art Skool Boys together. I tried not to laugh at them. I probably looked like I was intentionally rocking the Helena Bonham Carter in Sweeney Todd look, they don’t know I always look like that in the morning.

Here’s the website for the exhibit. This sketch made me laugh the most. (I’d swear it was labelled as a collaboration but the website doesn’t give any indication of that).

Tim Burton, Blind Man with Permanent Seeing Eye Dogs

[Because most of the sites I wanted to link to use flash and iphones and flash are mortal enemies, this post got scrambled on Monday so I’ve edited it to add links and images and reposted it.]