PEE-WEE'S BIG ADVENTURE (1985)
Production Company: Warner Bros.
Producers: Robert Shapiro, Richard Gilbert Abramson
Director: Tim Burton
Screenplay: Phil Hartman, Paul Reubens, Michael Varhol
Camera: Victor J. Kemper, A.S.C.
Score: Danny Elfman
Production Designer: David L. Snyder
Cast: Pee-Wee Herman (Himself), Elizabeth Daily (Dottie), Mark Holton (Francis), Diane Salinger (Simone), James Brolin (PW), Morgan Fairchild (Dottie)

Burton's first feature film is a road movie constructed with flair and striking visual touches around Pee-Wee Herman's children's TV-show personality. Pee-Wee's big advenure is the quest for his most precious possession: his bike, the most beautiful bicycle in the world, that has been stolen from him. Since Pee-Wee's character is fundamentally unchangeable, the episodic structure of the road movie is an ideal format to explore the possibilities of his character by bringing it into contact with any number of characters without losing the plot's main point of reference: Pee-Wee's quest for his stolen bike.

Pee-Wee's character is an outsider if ever there was one, but he lives in a bizarre world virtually exploding with colors, shapes and strange characters, ranging from the ghost of truck driver Large Marge to the escaped felon who was convicted for cutting loose one of those labels attached to the bottom of a mattress. The film functions within a semi-surrealist, sunny anarchy where anything goes, and resembles in many ways a live-action animation film: visually Pee-Wee's Big Adventure certainly resembles the colorfulness of a cartoon, full of primary colors, toys and cheerful neighbors.
The fact that there is also a darker side to this anarchic sunniness is revealed in Pee-Wee's nightmares, where evil clowns, animated dinosaurs and the devil himself molest his bike. These sequences, as well as the darker scenes right after Pee-Wee's bike disappears, illustrate the flipside of Pee-Wee's comic book world, where everything is dark and clowns are the helpers of Satan.