The World of Stainboy 1-Disc Box Set DVD

The World of Stainboy is the 2000 Tim Burton-directed Flash-animated short series, originally produced for Shockwave.com and later picked up for IFC airings, in which Stainboy, a small, leak-prone superhero from Burton's poetry book The Melancholy Death of Oyster Boy, is dispatched by the local police to handle a rotating cast of equally strange Burton-universe outsider characters. The series ran across 6 short episodes that drop Stainboy into a different odd-creature encounter each week.

What stands out is the show's commitment to the poetry book's tone. Each short is moody, silent, illustrated in Burton's specific hand, and built around a quietly sad outsider rather than a traditional supervillain. The Flash animation keeps the line work direct from Burton's original drawings, the music is somber and orchestral, and the runtime is short enough to feel closer to a moving illustration than to a traditional cartoon episode.

It belongs to a very specific early-2000s wave of web-native short-form animation, the same family of Shockwave-era experiments that briefly defined how new short series could be commissioned and distributed before broader video-streaming platforms existed. For Burton fans, the Stainboy shorts are one of the most direct extensions of the poetry book ever produced.

Highlights in the collection include "Stare Girl," "Toxic Boy," "Bowling Ball Head," "Robot Boy," "Matchstick Girl," and "The Origin Of Stainboy," the complete six-episode run that follows the small hero through his entire dispatch list. This 1-DVD collection gathers all 6 episodes, the complete World of Stainboy in one place, the only sensible home for a series that streaming has not kept available.