Director brings stop-motion style back to cinema with latest film
Anyone who knows the work of Tim Burton can see his distinctive style in every minute of his films.
Burton’s last two films, “Alice in Wonderland” and “Dark Shadows,” certainly featured his visual panache, but they lacked the twisted vision of his early films. They weren’t “Burton-y” enough. His newest film, “Frankenweenie,” based on his own 1984 live-action short, is a black-and-white feature lovingly created with stop-motion animation.
The basic story remains the same in both versions: A child brings his recently deceased dog back to life with electricity à la Frankenstein’s monster. In the new film, Victor Frankenstein (voiced by Charlie Tahan) is a shy student and a mad scientist in the making. His only friend is his beloved dog Sparky. His parents (voiced by Martin Short and Catherine O’Hara) wish their son would socialize more. He becomes inspired by his new science teacher Mr. Rzykruski (voiced by Martin Landau) when he announces the school will host a science fair. His father, however, wants Victor to get out more, so he encourages him to play baseball. When Victor goes to bat for the first time, he knocks the ball out of the park, and Sparky, always close to Victor, chases the ball into the street and gets hit by a car. Victor is devastated by the death of his dog, so he decides to stitch him together again and zap him back to life with lightning. The experiment is a success, but he must keep his reanimated dog away from his family and friends. Nosy classmate Edgar “E” Gore (voiced by Atticus Shaffer) finds out his secret, and before long the whole science class knows of Victor’s pet project. They experiment on their own pets, and their results turn out more monstrous.
The gloriously macabre animation creates a world that feels handmade and tactile. Some people thought Burton’s last foray into stop-motion animation, “Corpse Bride,” looked so slick that it seemed computer-animated, thus defeating the purpose of using stop-motion. On this film, Burton and his animators created a jerkier style of animation with less movement per frame.
The film recalls many aspects of Burton’s earlier films. The voice cast features many actors Burton hasn’t worked with in years (Catherine O’Hara and Winona Ryder from “Beetlejuice,” Martin Short from “Mars Attacks!” and Martin Landau from “Ed Wood”). The town in the film, New Holland — called so as an excuse to have a burning windmill at the end of the film — looks exactly like the town in “Edward Scissorhands.” The look of the animation is similar to “The Nightmare Before Christmas.” Many of the characters in the film resemble classic horror film actors (Peter Lorre, Vincent Price) or characters (Igor, Frankenstein’s monster.)
The film is only 87 minutes long, but it drags a little at times before the finale. The original short was just less than half an hour, and the story does seemed somewhat stretched at close to 90 minutes. In the end, the humor and heart in the film carry it through its occasional lulls.