Four stars. Rating: PG, for dramatic intensity and whimsical horror
By Derrick Bang
Sometimes, revenge truly is a dish best served coffin-cold.
In the early 1980s, several years
before Tim Burton became the deliciously macabre fantasist we all know and
love, he was just another young animator at the Walt Disney Studios. Early
assignments included conceptual art and animation on The Fox and the Hound, TRON
and The Black Cauldron, although he
received no credit for these efforts.
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| The family, during happier times: Young Victor shares his most recent amateur movie with his mother and father, while the short film's primary star — Victor's beloved dog, Sparky — takes his usual place, front and center. Sadly, things are about to get rather grim for poor Sparky. |
Young Burton was much more interested
in making his own shorts, which was encouraged by Disney at the time (as always
has been the case with Pixar). The first, 1982’s Vincent, was a six-minute, black-and-white, stop-motion tone-poem
about a little boy who imagined that he was Vincent Price; the actor himself
supplied the narration.
Next up was 1984’s Frankenweenie, a 29-minute live-action
short — again in black-and-white — about a little boy who took rather desperate
measures after his beloved dog was hit and killed by a car. The cast featured
Shelley Duvall, Daniel Stern and young Barret Oliver, who had a popular run during
the ’80s in films such as The NeverEnding
Story, D.A.R.Y.L. and Cocoon.
Frankenweenie was to be Burton’s last act at
Disney. The studio fired him, insisting — and you gotta love this — that he had
wasted the company’s money while making a film that was too dark and morbid to
be viewed by children.
Happily, Paul Reubens was among
the few who saw Frankenweenie, and he
immediately hired Burton to helm Pee-wee’s
Big Adventure. The rest, as they say, is history.
Flash-forward to the present day,
as Burton unveils his expanded, full-length version of Frankenweenie ... but now animated, in the stop-motion style of Vincent, The Nightmare Before Christmas and The Corpse Bride. Needless to say, it’ll be adored by his legion of
fans.
And the irony is scrumptious: The
film is released by Disney.
The stop-motion medium
notwithstanding, this updated Frankenweenie
is impressively faithful to its source, with whole sections and dialogue
exchanges lifted intact. (This can be verified easily; both Vincent and the original Frankenweenie are packaged with the DVD
of Nightmare before Christmas.) The
entire first act is essentially identical, as is the aftermath of the climax.
The new material — supplied by
scripter John August, who has written for Burton since 2003’s Big Fish — comes by way of a hilariously
ghoulish second chapter, as some of our young hero’s schoolmates rather
unwisely tamper with things best left alone.
Victor Frankenstein (voiced by
Charlie Tahan) is an intelligent, imaginative but mostly friendless little boy
who lives with his parents in New Holland, another of the oddly time-locked,
Burton-esque suburban neighborhoods that go all the way back to Edward Scissorhands. Dad (Martin Short)
is the family breadwinner, heading to work each day; Mom (Catherine O’Hara)
cleans the house and then lounges about, inevitably in heels, pearls and the
sort of dress more appropriate for dinner at a fancy restaurant.
Very June Cleaver and Leave It to Beaver-ish, in other words
... the classic American suburbia that existed only in the warped imaginations
of 1950s Hollywood.
Aside from science projects and
making amateur movies, Victor’s life is brightened by his faithful and beloved
bull terrier, Sparky. The two are inseparable, except when Victor must attend
school; Sparky occupies those hours by snuffling through the fence at the
night-black poodle that lives next door. That would be Persephone, owned by the
dour and soulful Elsa Van Helsing (Winona Ryder), forced to live with her
pompous uncle, Mr. Burgemeister (also voiced by Short), who happens to be mayor
of New Holland.
Imagine Morticia, of The Addams
Family, as a little girl; that’ll give you a bead on Elsa.
She’s pretty much the only
neighborhood kid who “gets” Victor, although he’s too wrapped up in his own
world to notice. Worse yet, Victor is pestered constantly by Edgar “E” Gore
(Atticus Shaffer), an obnoxious, simpering toady who clearly couldn’t be trusted
as far as he could be thrown; and the local “weird girl” (O’Hara again), and
her oddly creepy cat, Mr. Whiskers.
Alas, tragedy strikes and Sparky
departs this mortal coil, laid to rest in a pet cemetery that Stephen King
would adore. (Watch for the tombstone that reads “Goodbye Kitty.”) Distraught
almost beyond endurance, Victor perks up only after watching an experiment
performed by his Vincent Price-esque school science teacher, Mr. Rzykruski
(Martin Landau).
A bit of electricity, and a dead
frog’s legs jerk spasmodically. What sort of result, Victor wonders, might a
bigger charge produce?
Before you can say Boris Karloff,
Victor has transformed the family attic into a crazy-quilt laboratory straight
out of Universal Studios ... or, more accurately, straight out of Burton’s
original short, by way of the marvelous set design found in Universal’s 1931
production of Frankenstein.
We all know how it turned out for
that Victor Frankenstein, and the
results are no different this time. And, similarly, young Victor decides that
it would be wise to conceal his reanimated pooch ... who, in his excitement,
often wags stray body parts off. But some secrets are too big to be kept for
long, particularly once the ghastly Edgar comes sniffing around.
Before long, the “secret” is
common knowledge among Edgar and three other kids — Nassor, Toshiaki and Bob —
who view Victor’s experiments as the key to winning the school science fair.
And you just know that won’t turn out
well...
Stop-motion seems the perfect
medium for this tale; the spindly-legged puppets and their oddly erratic
movements amplify the mildly disturbing setting and atmosphere of, well,
impending doom. Cinematographer Peter Sorg’s grayscale color palette also feels
right, both because it harkens back to all those 1930s Universal monster
movies, and because such stories just feel
right in black-and-white; shadows are darker, while flashes of electricity are
more starkly bright.
But if the human characters amble
about in whimsical parodies of real-world people, animation director Trey
Thomas and his crew make Sparky 100 percent faithful to his doggy-ness. He
runs, jumps, chases his tail and bounds about Victor’s back yard just like an
actual pooch, complete with the buoyant, eager-to-please grin of a creature who
understands that his job in life — and death — is to be unbridled love on four
legs.
Indeed, Sparky’s behavior feels
so genuine that we tend to forget he isn’t
an actual, real-world dog ... which makes his eventual fate that much more
heartbreaking.
When it isn’t morbidly funny, of
course. Or mildly disgusting.
A few of August’s plot threads
stray in odd directions or remain unresolved, perhaps because everybody gets
sidetracked when New Holland is invaded by ... well ... the stuff of nightmares.
Mr. Burgemeister’s insistence that his niece perform at the New Holland Dutch
Day celebration (with candles?) never quite fits in with the rest of the story,
particularly when we’re forced to watch the poor girl stumble through a lengthy
song that’s bizarre even by this film’s standards.
I’m also not satisfied with the
way things work out between Elsa and Victor, or — for that matter — the similar
manner in which the “weird girl” sorta-kinda vanishes during the climax.
But these are minor quibbles,
certainly not intrusive enough to interfere with the film’s greater joys.
Longtime Burton collaborator Danny Elfman provides another of his energetic, effervescent
scores, and the composer has a field day with the third act’s monster-laden
hijinks.
None of this story would work, of
course, if we didn’t accept and believe in the core relationship: the mutual
devotion shared by a dog and his boy ... even if the dog has electrodes, and
the boy would be better off inhabiting the Twilight Zone.
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