Artist Pee-wee's Big Adventure

Defined by the cartoonish personality of Paul Reubens’ character, the funhouse music of Danny Elfman, and the visual design of cartoonist Paul Chadwick, the 1985 kiddie comedy Pee-wee’s Big Adventure wasn’t immediately linked with the sensibility of its young director, Tim Burton. It wasn’t until Burton’s subsequent films like Beetlejuice and Edward Scissorhands that Pee-wee’s Big Adventure began to fit into Burton’s career-long devotion to surreal, cutesy outsiderdom. Pee-wee is among Burton’s best: a feather-light road picture with Reubens touring a gently grotesque America in search of his stolen bicycle.

Updated 11/05/2009