While many of Tim Burton’s most beloved films over the years have been collaborations with Disney, he was actually fired by the studio back in 1984. Walt Disney Studios was Burton’s first real studio job, having been hired by the company out of college after they saw his short film Stalk of the Celery Monster. Burton continued to work on the animation team with films like The Fox and the Hound while also producing his own short films, such as 1982’s Vincent and Burton’s live-action short Hansel and Gretel. While he would come back to Disney much later to produce The Nightmare Before Christmas, Burton was surprisingly let go from his employee position in 1984.
The gothic fantasy master would work with many studios after Disney during his career as he dove into different genres and IP, such as Burton’s Batman movies with Warner Brothers. Although his first round of successful features like Beetlejuice and Edward Scissorhands would be produced elsewhere, Burton returned to work with the Mouse House several times over the years. Burton and Disney have gone their separate ways over 5 times since he was first hired out of college, but he enjoys that they have a “revolving door” policy (via Yahoo! Movies) and keep the opportunity for collaborations open. Disney and Tim Burton’s collaborations, like The Nightmare Before Christmas, have produced some of the most beloved movies to date, so many find it curious that he was originally fired from the studio in the mid-’80s.
Since 1984, rumors of Tim Burton actually being fired as a young employee have circled, but it wasn’t until much later that he confirmed the reason for his Disney departure. In an interview with Yahoo! Movies in 2012, Burton was asked if it was true that he had been fired by Disney after his 1984 short film Frankenweenie, which would ironically become a full stop-motion feature at the studio in 2012. Burton responded that it was true, but that it wasn’t a firing in the way many have imagined. He recalled that it was Disney’s version of firing which was much more kind, essentially saying “you go your way and we’ll go our way.” The Batman Returns director called it a “parting of ways” in which he was “let go” by the studio, suggesting his dismissal was amicable and he understood that Disney’s politics at the time wasn’t yet suited for his style and the dark nature of projects like Frankenweenie.
Along with confirming that Burton’s discharge happened after finishing the live-action short film Frankenweenie, Disney producer Don Hahn, who was also an employee at the time, revealed to Yahoo! Movies that the studio’s decision to fire Burton came down to his eerie style. Hahn, who also served as producer on the 2012 Frankenweenie movie, claimed that Disney “didn’t know what to do with [Burton]” because his movies were too quirky and odd for the studio’s image. Following backlash from Disney's dark animated movie The Black Cauldron (1985), which could benefit from a live-action Disney remake, the studio was trying to distance itself from films that were “too scary” for kids, and dark twists were Burton's specialty. Disney’s projects were still fairly conservative in 1984, so spending studio time and money on Burton’s features that fell under the “too scary” category wasn’t feasible, and ultimately underlined his departure.
With The Black Cauldron already indicating that Disney’s audiences weren’t ready for Burton’s style, it didn’t help that his spooky Frankenweenie short had been completed that same year. The overall reasons for Frankenweenie being the catalyst for Burton’s firing were that it was too scary for Disney’s 1984 audiences and producing more unreleasable movies of the same caliber meant wasting studio money. While firing stop-motion master Burton was Disney-fied and gentle, they clearly realized less than a decade later that the studio and audience landscape had changed and his gothic approach would now land with kids. Burton was finally brought back in the early '90s to produce The Nightmare Before Christmas, which he first wrote as a Disney employee in 1982. After another few decades, Disney would produce Frankenweenie, the movie that first got him fired, as a full feature directed by Tim Burton himself.