The World of Stainboy is a series of flash animation shorts created in 2000 by director Tim Burton

Tim Burton

Timothy William "Tim" Burton is an American film director, film producer, writer and artist. He is famous for dark, quirky-themed movies such as Beetlejuice, Edward Scissorhands, The Nightmare Before Christmas, Ed Wood, Sleepy Hollow, Corpse Bride and Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet...

 and animated by Flinch Studio. The character Stainboy first appeared in two short poems in the book The Melancholy Death of Oyster Boy & Other Stories, also created and illustrated by Tim Burton.

In the shorts, Stainboy works for the Burbank

Burbank, California

Burbank is a city in Los Angeles County in Southern California, United States, north of downtown Los Angeles. The estimated population in 2010 was 103,340....

 police, and at the start of each episode he is ordered to investigate and bring in social outcasts. Many of the outcasts are characters from the Oyster Boy book. Each of the six episodes is under five minutes in length. The final episode had Stainboy living through a flashback

Flashback (narrative)

Flashback is an interjected scene that takes the narrative back in time from the current point the story has reached. Flashbacks are often used to recount events that happened before the story’s primary sequence of events or to fill in crucial backstory...

 to his early childhood at an orphanage

Orphanage

An orphanage is a residential institution devoted to the care of orphans – children whose parents are deceased or otherwise unable or unwilling to care for them...

, implying the beginning of a larger storyline; although, no further episodes were produced.

In November 2010, Burton began a new story about Stainboy, on the Twitter

Twitter

Twitter is an online social networking and microblogging service that enables its users to send and read text-based posts of up to 140 characters, informally known as "tweets".Twitter was created in March 2006 by Jack Dorsey and launched that July...

account "BurtonStory." Fans could contribute to the story via Twitter, and the best continuation Tweets of the day would be re-Tweeted by BurtonStory. The project ended on December 6; the full story can be read at www.burtonstory.com/connect.php.

List of episodes

1. "The Girl Who Stares"
2. "The Toxic Boy"
3. "The Bowling Ball"
4. "The Robot Boy"
5. "The Match Girl"
6. "Stainboy's Day Off"