Frankenweenie is both a ghoulish
pre-Halloween treat and something more notable yet: Tim Burton, at a moment
when (James Cameron aside) he might be the world’s most bankable director,
trying to get his head round why he got into this business. Burton began Frankenweenie as a stop-motion short in
his early days as a Disney animator; in its completed state, it’s become a
recapitulation of this director’s most enduring concerns – suburban
strangeness, the hypocrisy of adults set against the curiosity of young minds –
and of those films in his back catalogue that really matter: the Edward Scissorhands, the Batmans, the Ed Woods. You get some hint of what Burton is getting at from the
fact the female lead is voiced by Winona Ryder.
In
this quasi-autobiographical vein, it seems telling that its young hero Victor’s
moment of greatest triumph – hitting a home run in a school baseball match,
equating to all those $500m-plus hits Burton has knocked out of the park for
the studios – should also spell disaster. While attempting to retrieve the
ball, Victor’s faithful terrier Sparky is run over by a car. A creative mind,
Victor soon brings what he loves back to life with a few nuts and bolts and the
odd lightning bolt of inspiration – only to find that this small, personal, if
you will pet project is considered
altogether too strange by the squarish townsfolk, who’d rather their offspring
stuck to reading Alice in Wonderland
and watching harmless old TV shows.
Burton
gets this on some level, which is possibly why Frankenweenie seeks to preserve its weirdness, rather than cartoon
it up, as in his recent live-action work. Victor’s science mentor Mr. Rzykruski
has the look of Vincent Price about him, and gets a bound-to-be-misunderstood
speech at a PTA meeting, marvellously voiced in cracked English by Martin
Landau (“I try to crack open children’s heads, and get at their BRAINS”). And
our hero’s classmates are unapologetic freaks, from cackling sidekick Edgar to
the skeletal blonde – DNA of a Corpse
Bride – who reads signs into what she finds in her cat’s litter tray.
The
level of craft and detail on show goes far beyond that of churned-out multiplex
filler like Hotel Transylvania. It
turns out that monochrome photography and state-of-the-art stereoscopy make
excellent bedfellows: the film’s gorgeous approximation of the flat light of
1960s suburbia puts the energy-sapping murkiness of most contemporary 3D productions
to shame. It also helps that everyone’s working from a taut, funny John August
script, full of curlicued set-ups and pay-offs that keep us smiling on the way
to the rousing, kill-the-monsters finale.
Frankenweenie may, ultimately,
contain nothing so challenging as a Coraline;
often it seems as though it should arrive prefaced by a deep voice (a Price,
perhaps, or a Christopher Lee) intoning the words “Previously, on Tim Burton…”
in the manner of our favourite serials. But if – as a wise soul once ventured –
a director’s career is an ongoing conversation with the audience, this is the
moment when an old friend who’s spent far too long quietly counting his money
in the corner pipes up with the one thing that reminds you why you always loved
or liked, felt worried about or protective towards them. It’s good to have
Burton back in the land of the living dead.
Frankenweenie opens nationwide today.
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