Barry Purves

Tara Mcpherson

Quentin Blake

I also decided to look at Quentin Blake's illustrations, the scratchy uneven angular characters create a similar kind of feel to Tim Burton's style of drawing for his character designs.
These types of illustrations are the kind of style I want to use as reference for my work, to create a kind of dark surrealist atmospheric kind of animation.

Tim Burton on Animation

With Tim Burtons unique surrealist style his characters are preferred to be tall, thin with small feet, which creates a challenge when it comes to making the puppets and expecting them to perform the actions in the script, especially since balance is one of the main difficulties of the character design.
Burton's stylised puppets are uncomfortably sharp and angular, best stand out in a specific light with lots of atmospheric shadow making his work look dark but usually well supported by voice actors and soundtrack.
Even his live actions film such as Beetle Juice and Edward Scissor Hands were filmed in the same atmospheric grotesque other worldly way.
A Nightmare Before Christmas character models were done by the finest animators in the world that brought the creepy characters eerily to life on an elaborate sets with grotesque anthropomorphic buildings, crumbling masonry, rusting railings and dank cobbled streets, all which were textured to have the look of the scratchy cross-hatched, pen work found in Tim Burtons original drawings.
With the triumph of model making and animation especially with the gracefully thin Jack Skeleton that James and the Giant Peach was unable to capture the same imagination as Tim Burton's darkly disturbing Nightmare.