Stop-motion animation illustrates a poem about the boy Vincent Malloy, who dreams he is Vincent Price, living within a horror movie. There are a great number of visual references to Vincent Price films from the fifties (e.g. House of Wax, The Fall of the House of Usher) that demonstrate the boy's as well as the director's love for them, while being gently mocking at the same time. Vincent Malloy refuses to leave his fantasy horror world, in spite of the many attempts made by his parents to get him to do "normal" things like playing outside and going to baseball games. He becomes so enveloped in his own world of imagination that he finally withdraws from the outdside world totally, lying down on the floor, apparently motionless as well as lifeless.

The main contrast in the film is between Vincent's imaginary world, which is visualized in a gothic design similar to that of the German Expressionist films of the 1920s, and the "normal" world, which looks shoddy and bland in comparison. The long shadows, distorted perspective and contrasty black- and-white photography also evoke the classic thirties horror movies, while the hokey, over-the-top mad scientist sequences are heavily indebted to the horror film of the fifties. Visually speaking, Vincent could therefore be said to be a sort of exercise for many later Burton projects.
On the story level, Vincent can be seen as the prototype of Burton's misunderstood, sympathetic outsider living in a fantasy world that is more convincing and indeed more attractive than "normal reality" within the film. The existence of these two worlds within the film leads to a duality within the character of Vincent: on the one side Vincent as he is perceived by the outside world, an average kid who acts a little weird, and the Vincent we see as the real one, who is really Vincent Price. This use of split personality would also return in most of Tim Burton's later projects.