Frankenweeniemight be as close as Tim Burton will ever get to directing an autobiographical film. Byhis own account, he spent many hours as a boy in the graveyard downthe street from his tidy subdivision. An introverted child, Burton grew up tobecome the champion of weird outsiders as with Edward Scissorshands and Ed Wood. With the animated feature Frankenweenie (out in a Blu-ray combo pack),Burton remakes one of his early projects, his 1984 short cartoon for Disney,and revisits some of his earliest fascinations. Frankenweenie is a comically macabre,tip-of-the-hat to the old black-and-white horror movies regularly aired onbroadcast television when Burton was growing up.
Pointedly, the protagonist is named Victor, as in Frankenstein. However, he’s nota tormented scientist but a boy, probably Burton’s age when he whiled away timein the cemetery, who lost his beloved dog Sparky to a car accident. Victor(voiced by child actor Charlie Tahan) is inconsolable until an experiment inscience class lights his imagination. Drawing down the elemental energy oflightning, he reanimates Sparky, whose injuries left him stitched together likeFrankenstein’s monster, and whose existence triggers unintended consequencesthat could destroy the well-kempt town of New Holland, dominated by a windmillwhere the climactic scene will occur, much as in the 1931 film Frankenstein.
Burton’s delightful old school aesthetic is given full expression in Frankenweenie. Shot in brilliant black andwhite, the film’s animation is achieved by stop-motion photography and finishedin eye-popping 3D, a contemporary trend whose old roots are emphasized in theopening scene. Victor is a budding Super8 filmmaker in this retro, circa 1965setting. His monster movie involves the stop motion of plastic figures againstcardboard backdrops and is viewed through cardboard 3D glasses. It’s a niceeffort for a kid, but father worries. “All that time he spends up there,” hecomplains, motioning toward his son’s attic hideaway-studio. He’d like to seeVictor play baseball like the other boys.
Burton’s real life father was once a professional baseball player who, likeVictor’s dad, was forced into another field. New Holland stands for thefaceless Southern California suburb of Burbank where he grew up. Victor’sclassmates are all ghoulish and creepy, just as they might appear to a lonely,friendless boy. And there are several graveyard scenes, albeit it’s a petcemetery on a bleak windswept hill whose Gothic monuments suggest the restlessboneyards of old Hollywood horror pictures. Of course, Burton loads the settingwith sly humor. The gravestone of a departed tortoise is marked Shelley, a nodtoward the 19th century author of the original Frankenstein story,Mary Shelley.
The references to classic or at least vintage horror movies are almost toonumerous to list, with allusions to everything from The Birds to The Beast from 20,000Thousand Fathoms.But the focus is on James Whale’s campy 1935 production, The Bride ofFrankenstein,especially but not only in the scene where Victor’s attic-turned-laboratory isthe setting for jerry-rigged electrodes and generators and the lightning stormthat restores life to the corpse of Sparky. Victor’s science teacher is likethe mad Dr. Pretorius as he might have been played by Boris Karloff, speakingof the power of electricity in sepulchral Transylvanian tones with soft rolling“Rs.” And the obese and ugly-tempered Mr. Burgermeister, New Holland’s mayor,will rouse a torch-wielding mob of threatened conformists when the hourarrives.
The all-star cast of voices includes Winona Ryder as Elsa van Helsing, thesullen girl next door and potential love interest for Victor, and Martin Landauas the mad but not entirely unwise teacher who warns Victor that science is neithergood nor bad but can be used to either end. Even the outcome of an experiment,he implies, can be changed by the desires and attitudes of the experimenter.Little wonder that Victor’s electrical extravaganza results in a loving dogwhile the other kids who replicate his process produce only monsters.
