Tim Burton really did not like working with Disney

"I needed to escape."

The director of some of the most visually stunning Disney movies is distancing himself from The House of Mouse.

Tim Burton has been working with Disney on and off since all the way back in 1981, when he was just starting out his career as an (uncredited) animator on 'The Fox and the Hound'. Now, over 40 years later, he says that working with one of the biggest Studios in the world was like "working in this horrible big circus".

Burton will be more widely known for creating 'The Nightmare Before Christmas' and directing the live-action 'Alice in Wonderland' movies with Disney. However, it was his most recent (and final) outing with Disney, the 2019 live-action 'Dumbo', that made the film director finally see that he could not continue working with the company any longer.

Discussing his past Disney work at the Lumiere Festival in Lyon, France over the weekend, Burton said he "needed to escape". He told the audience: "My history is that I started out there. I was hired and fired like several times throughout my career there.

"The thing about 'Dumbo' is that’s why I think my days with Disney are done, I realised that I was Dumbo, that I was working in this horrible big circus and I needed to escape."

He also added that due to Marvel and it's long list of superheroes being a big focal point of Disney nowadays, and how uniform and slightly linear the movies need to be, he would never consider making a film with them. He would need more creative control than Disney would (presumedly) allow him: "It’s gotten to be very homogenized, very consolidated. There’s less room for different types of things. I can only deal with one universe, l can’t deal with a multi-universe."

Tim Burton may have severed his Disney ties going forward, but there's plenty more in the pipeline from the creator elsewhere. Next on Burton's agenda is the release of The Addams Family spin-off series, 'Wednesday', which lands on Netflix in a month's time. He's also been connected with a planned 'Beetlejuice' sequel film for many years, a question which he gave a "none-answer" to during the conference.

Tim Burton's 'Wednesday' series hits Netflix on November 23.