Frankenweenie| B
Charming
but slight, Tim Burton’s Frankenweenie may not have much depth or
ambition, but it has enough heart to win over most audiences. After all, how
can you go wrong with a boy and his dead dog?
Burton returns to his roots
with a full-length version of his ghoulishly funny 1984 short film. Riffing on
Universal Studio’s 1931 horror classic Frankenstein (and about half a
dozen other monster movie classics, from Godzilla to Gremlins),
he tells the tale of young Victor Frankenstein (the voice of Charlie Tahan),
whose beloved dog Sparky is hit by a car and killed. A budding filmmaker and
science-whiz, Victor is inspired by a science lesson on electricity to harness
the town’s nightly electrical storms to bring his dog back to life. Success!
He’s alive! Unfortunately, Victor’s creepy classmates learn of Sparky’s
resurrection, and, worried that they’ll be overshadowed at the school science
fair, decide to bring their own dead pets back to life. Monster mayhem ensues.
Though
Frankenweenie is never less than amusing, John August’s overly busy
script is devoid of true wit or substance. Like the doctor in Mary Shelley’s
novel, he stitches together Burton’s various fetishes but never establishes a
sense of purpose. There are some clever nods to classic horror films and a few
good sight gags, but for all the movie owes to Frankenstein, its
references are narrative, not thematic. Inevitably the movie devolves into
monster-movie commotion, racing from incident to incident rather than exploring
the repercussions (emotional or dramatic) of Victor’s actions.
Which
is a shame, because Victor and Sparky are, at first, portrayed with warmth and
empathy. But their bond never goes deeper. Once the dog is reanimated, Burton
and August do nothing with the relationship, and Sparky pretty much remains the
same pooch he always was — with various body parts falling off at inopportune
times. There is a promising subplot involving Mr. Rzykruski (Martin Landau),
Victor’s Vincent Price-like science teacher who calls the townfolk out on their
ignorance (it’s a wonderful stab at the red-state rejection of science and
learning), but nothing more is made of it. The idea disappears as soon as it’s
presented, and we’re left with only a single killer line to recall. “They like
what science gives them, but not the questions,” as Mr. Rzykruski says sadly.
Still,
Frankenweenie‘s creamy black-and-white stop-action animation is lovely
to behold. The puppets have gorgeously exaggerated bodies and dark-ringed,
soulful eyes that give life to Burton’s macabre, humanist impulses. Once again,
the director presents a triumph of style and design, finding laughs in unlikely
places (as in repeated reaction shots of a white cat named Mr. Whiskers and his
unblinking little girl owner) and composing gorgeous moments of cinematic
wonder.
But
Tim Burton used to have guts. From the surreal outsider weirdness of Pee
Wee’s Big Adventure and Beetlejuice to the romantic alienation of Edward
Scissorhands, he was the broody but mischievous filmmaker who made Ed Wood
empathetic while joyfully allowing Martians to incinerate Congress in an
ambitious attempt to parody Kubrickian satire. Somewhere along the line (most
think Planet of the Apes), he became Disney’s company man, a director
neutered of his darker impulses and empowered by his goth-cartoon sense of
design. Frankenweenie, which is probably his best film in more than a
decade, is more a reminder of what Burton has lost as a filmmaker than a return
to what made him so exciting to begin with.
This article appears in Oct 3-9, 2012.