"The film Big Fish directed by Tim Burton centers on the quest of a dying man’s son to find out what has been ‘real’ and ‘mythic’ in his relationship to his father. The father, a traveling salesman, has always been a master story teller; but what if nothing was true in the stories? And more profoundly, is anything really more true than narration itself? The son dismisses ‘just the stories’ as not true; but is his realism, really, flawed? Thus, the film rotates around the reality of fantasy. And, in new age imagery, it ends with the son bearing the father to the sea (death)—the father’s life secured as the story of the ‘big fish’...individual is gone and that organisation and business now determine the value of actions. It is instructive to compare Daniel Wallace’s (1998) book to Tim Burton’s film, to see the role of the theatrical. In the novel, the son is the narrator and his desire to mythologize plays a central role. But in the film Big Fish, the telling (more or less) tells itself, whereby the last scene is no longer what the son wishes for the father, it is mythically real. What remains desire, fantasy and wish-fulfilment in the novel becomes ‘reality’ and ‘true’ in the film. The film is much more radical in its embrace of the simulacra than is the novel...Burton, in Big Fish, uses the absurd mythology of giants, witches and Siamese twins to make the mythic in Edward’s biography bigger than life. The fantastic stories of Edward are used by Burton to evoke the circus and a Disney-like nostalgia. The drama is domesticated myth. Edward’s death is not tragic or anxious; it is mythic and (new age) spiritual. Edward claims eternal life as storyteller. In Burton’s death of the salesman, death is overcome by the storyteller function...Big Fish as film, in the tradition of Hollywood productions, is to be associated with the dream-machine of American society....The film, Big Fish, is a collage of flashbacks interspersed with pseudo-naturalistic storytelling. It entails segmenting fragments and ordering them in such a way that a mythic logic is constructed...The movie, by which we roll up the real world on a spool in order to unroll it as a magic carpet of fantasy, is the means for storytelling in contemporary life...."
"Big Fish...reached heights of whimsy and fantasy. Helping lift the hearts and imaginations of audiences was a particular challenge for the designers...as they tried to balance reality and fantasy, conveying each with different looks and styles using period design and costumes...Pic retells his oft-told, over-the-top stories about his life in the South from 1939 to the present in flashbacks sometimes based on what "really" happened and sometimes based on Bloom’s picaresque elaborations of reality...presented designers with a hefty challenge: to effectively distinguish between real and fantasy worlds while remaining true in some fashion to the period in question and the story being told... the distinction between reality and fantasy had to be drawn more subtly. The idea was to keep audiences guessing until the very end about the true extent of the yarn-spinner’s fantasy world. Indeed, the whole film revolves around the difficulties others have in telling the difference between Edward Bloom’s fantasies and the less-entertaining actual details of his life... Its never quite clear who is real and who is merely part of some tall tale or another...many of the film’s most striking effects aren’t computer-created post-production work but old-fashioned camera tricks...'This wasn’t a fantasy movie with a lot of CGI work; it was a fantasy movie where we actually did it,” [recalls set decorator Nancy Haigh]
2004
Critical commentary on design; Academy Award-winning set designer Nancy Haigh calls it a "fantasy movie".
"Big Fish will open the 22nd Brussels Intl. Festival of Fantastic Film on March 12."
2004
World news; Festival is Brussels International Fantastic Film Festival. According to the organization, its purpose is to "reveal and to valorise the cinematographic works in the fantasy, science-fiction or thriller genre..."[1]
"Director Tim Burton's family fantasy swims to DVD and VHS on April 27 from Columbia...The DVD's ocean of supplements include commentary; three character journey featurettes, four filmmaker's path featurettes and a trivia game."
2004
DVD release announcement. Refers to film as a "family fantasy" and to a featurette that has a "character journey".
