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.
