Frankenweenie: Delightfully ghoulish dog's tale

Frankenweenie (2012) • View trailer
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.

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.

Alice in Wonderland: It's a wonder!

Alice in Wonderland (2010) • View trailer for Alice in Wonderland
Four stars (out of five). Rating: PG, for monster-battling violence
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 3.5.10
Buy DVD: Alice in Wonderland • Buy Blu-Ray: Alice in Wonderland [Blu-ray]


The knowledge that a new version of Alice in Wonderland would involve director Tim Burton, star Johnny Depp and scripter Linda Woolverton — who worked on Disney's Beauty and the Beast, The Lion King and Mulan — seemed a match made in heaven.

I couldn't imagine a trio of artistic sensibilities better suited to Lewis Carroll's wildly imaginative and sneakily subversive classics.

Alice (Mia Wasikowska, center) approaches her destiny -- to face the
Jabberwocky on a field of battle -- as the Mad Hatter (Johnny Depp) and
White Queen (Anne Hathaway) offer words of encouragement, in Tim Burton's
gleefully opulent handling of Alice in Wonderland.

And, indeed, this re-booted Alice in Wonderland is an eye-popping delight: a perfect showcase for Burton's zany visual panache, Depp's whimsically eccentric performance style and Woolverton's blend of fairy-tale affectations with modern sensibilities.

Burton's film isn't actually an adaptation of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland; it's a mash-up of that 1865 novel and its 1872 sequel, Through the Looking Glass, and What Alice Found There, along with the nonsense poem — "Jabberwocky" — that is part of the latter book. Additionally, this interpretation of Alice takes place a bit later, after our heroine has matured into a young woman on the verge of marriage, who suffers from a recurring dream that involves all sorts of strange creatures from a dimly remembered realm.

This changes the story dynamic, transforming our protagonist from a mostly helpless little girl — who merely witnesses assorted strange events — into a resourceful, kick-ass action heroine who takes charge of her own destiny.

Not that she starts out that way. Even this more mature Alice, a practical young woman, spends a good deal of time believing that she's having another bad dream, instead of actually living it.

Events begin amid the boorish British aristocracy, where Alice (Mia Wasikowska, appropriately plucky) — having lost the father she loved dearly, and therefore forced into unpalatable options — receives a proposal of marriage from a titled lout not fit to lace up this intelligent, high-spirited young woman's corset. (Not that she believes in wearing such a pointless clothing accessory.)