Timothy Walter Burton was born on August 25, 1958. Since he was little, he drew, and drew well. He was raised in Burbank, a part of Los Angeles County where rows of identical houses repeated themselves. He loved his family, but he didn't relate to them. Burton grew up in the 1950s, where a narrow idea of normalcy was perpetuated by a puritanical vision of the American dream.His father, Bill, a former minor league baseball player, worked for the Burbank Department of Parks and Recreations and drew secretly on the side. His mother, Rickie, owned a niche shop that sold cat-themed knickknacks. She had a crafty streak; Burton remembers her making pinecone Santas and snowmen for Christmas. His brother, Daniel, was also artistically talented, though Burton says they each "did their own thing."

　　Estranged from his neighborhood and family, Burton found respite by playing in the local cemetery. But the gravestones offered temporary solace. The pressure to conform turned Burton inward, and in response he unleashed his artwork outward. He had an ally in his high school art teacher, Doris Adams, who encouraged her students to follow their own paths. Burton knew he couldn't draw like everyone else, and he felt inadequate. It was a revelation and turning point when Burton realized that he didn't have to draw like everyone else. Art became both his catharsis and a way to escape into a fantasy world. Peers in school labeled him "weird" for his creative tendencies, and he learned at an early age about society's tendency to catalogue and judge.He developed an allergy to both categorization and authority.

　　Being characterized as an outsider gave Burton the unexpected freedom to express himself. He embraced being different and this choice fomented his artistic talents. No longer desiring to fit in, he began observing the people and society around him, almost like one of his beloved inventors with a science project. His experiments were his stories. From the beginning, Burton was a visual storyteller. He wrote and illustrated amusing poems and children's books, directed and starred in Super-8 movies, and staged elaborate pranks in his neighborhood, such as tossing clothes into a neighbor's pool which had just been cleaned with strong chemicals, and convincing him that a person had fallen in and dissolved.

　　Burton always forged his own path, using artwork as a way to avoid writing assignments, submitting self-made Super-8 films and drawn reports instead. Rather than buy greeting cards, Burton designed his own. Always nontraditional, they ranged from two trees decorating a "Christmas man" to a get-well card where an alien is dressed like a doctor. Ironically, the suburban town that drove him to create was accepting of his artwork. In the ninth grade, he won a local competition to design an anti-litter poster, which graced the sides of City of Burbank garbage trucks. In high school, he placed third in a Burbank Fire Department fire prevention poster contest. Around the same time, he and a group of peers won third place in a World of Wheels van painting competition (his team received their award from a woman costumed as Zira from the 1968 Planet of the Apes). His artwork populated the posters of the Burbank Youth Band in which Burton participated, as well as school drama productions. His drawing of an angry football player squashing the opposing team ran on the front of The Burbank City Employee newsletter in 1977, after Burton turned 19.

　　Though Burton had friends, they were transient. The constants in his childhood were horror and science-fiction films and similarly themed television shows. He felt a kinship with those poor, beleaguered creatures like Frankenstein and the Creature from the Black Lagoon. Films expanded the boundaries of Burton's world closer to the size of the one he so desired. He revered the legendary Vincent Price and identified with such maestros of classic horror as Lon Chaney Sr. and Jr., Boris Karloff, Peter Lorre, and Béla Lugosi. Burton immersed himself in the Hammer films shot in vivid Technicolor, directed by the likes of Terence Fisher, starring Christopher Lee, Peter Cushing, and Michael Gough. He admired the luscious dreamscapes of director Federico Fellini, and was enchanted by the Italian horror directors, Mario Bava and Dario Argento, whose stylized films were filled with bright reds and dark purpose. He loved the Godzilla monster movies by Ishiro Honda, the low-budget films of Roger Corman, the campy Russ Meyer films that satirized conventional society, the horrible but memorable movies of Ed Wood, and sciencefiction thrillers starring Charlton Heston. He spent his time watching The Twilight Zone and The Outer Limits on television. He was swept up by the magic of the stop-motion animation in Ray Harryhausen's animated sequences and the unique color palette of Basil Gogos illustrations on the covers of Famous Monsters of Filmland magazines (one of the few publications he avidly read). He appreciated the unconventional children's stories of Roald Dahl, and he became enthralled by the mysterious words of Edgar Allan Poe.

　　He also found a release in punk music—hard and fast and anti-establishment. He was attracted to anything dark, dramatic, emotional, subversive, enigmatic, and humorous. His playful attitude towards the dead formed at the same time. Growing up in a region with a large Hispanic population exposed Burton to the Mexican holiday, Día de los Muertos (Day of the Dead), where death is a festive celebration of life rather than a somber, taboo topic.

　　Much of his artwork, and many of his films, pull from these early influences. His short Vincent is a tribute to Vincent Price and quotes lines from Poe's poem, "The Raven." He later worked with Price again in Edward Scissorhands, and filmed an as-yet-unreleased documentary, Conversations with Vincent, that contains some of the last footage of Price alive. He has worked with Christopher Lee, Michael Gough, and Charlton Heston. Harryhausen's animated sequence from Jason and the Argonauts appears briefly in the Bones music video Burton directed for The Killers. Corpse Bride is suffused with the flavor of Día de los Muertos, where the underworld of the dead sings a lively tune, and the real world manifests itself as grim. The mood of both Sleepy Hollow and Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street echo those of the Hammer films. More saliently, Burton directed Ed Wood, a film about the notorious director. He adapted into a film Roald Dahl's book Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (also producing the animated adaptation of Dahl's James and the Giant Peach). An admirer of the abstract nightmarish artwork of Francis Bacon, Burton displays Bacon's painting, Figure with Meat, in Batman.

　　When asked in interviews how he became successful, Burton usually replies that he was just very lucky. His modesty overshadows his drive. A certain amount of luck features in any success story, but a combination of talent and perseverance, a singular vision, and an absolute need to communicate this has served him throughout his career. He knew early on that he wanted to be an artist, though he never formulated that into something as specific as a director. When only 17, Burton submitted a fully illustrated children's book to Walt Disney Productions, titled The Giant Zlig, detailing in rhyme the adventures of monsters living in the land of Zlv. He received a letter back from the editor who praised both the story and the imagery, though ultimately writing it might be too similar to Dr. Seuss for their current publishing needs. Indeed, Burton has often named Theodor Seuss Geisel (better known as Dr. Seuss) as a strong influence. Dr. Seuss imbued his whimsical illustrations with subtle messages of anti-authority and other political leanings that appealed to the young Burton. To this day, Burton continues to write most of his verses in simple yet clever rhymes.

　　During his senior year in high school, Burton applied for and received a scholarship to attend The California Institute of the Arts (Cal Arts), where Walt Disney Studios had just set up a training school for prospective animators. Several of his sketchbooks still exist from this time period, and sprinkled amongst the nudes and Disney animation assignment sketches are Burton's beloved monsters and aliens. During Cal Arts, he worked his first summer as an "inbetweener" at Hanna-Barbera on the cartoon Super Friends and his second as a rotoscope artist on the 1978 Lord of the Rings. At the end of each school year, Burton animated a project in the hopes of being chosen for Disney's animation team. After his third year at Cal Arts, fighting debt, Burton created Stalk of the Celery Monster, a one-and-a-half-minute animated short about the horror of dentistry. It was a clever piece that demonstrated Burton's potential. Disney hired him.

　　Initially relieved to have the job, Burton soon realized that Disney's style poorly suited his own. He attempted to conform his methods to being an "inbetweener" on The Fox and the Hound, filling in animation between key frames. With typical humility and self-deprecation, he has often said that he couldn't draw Disney, and his foxes looked like "road kill." There was a fox or two scattered in his old sketchbooks, and they were a fair representation of a fox. His artistic talent was certainly good enough to reproduce a cartoon animal. But what is conveyed in their faint, forced lines is that they were painfully drawn and empty of the life and emotion that typically inhabits Burton's art and sets it apart. One can almost see him shuddering as he draws those cute foxes, feeling like road kill himself.