Frankenweenie (2012)

Frankenweenie (2012)

7/10

Starring

Catherine O'Hara

Martin Short

Martin Landau

Charlie Tahan

Directed by Tim Burton

Frankenweenie is another masterful story telling stop motion animation by Tim Burton. The movie is fun and captivating, but I fear the tone and the desire to make the movie black and white to set the mode for the Frankenstein story will not go well with children. In my own view after a while I forgot the movie was set in black and white and just enjoyed every moment of seeing how Burton made a film I will remember for a long time to come.

Frankenweenie is a nice remake of the Frankenstein story through the eyes of Tim Burton. Tim’s natural drawn to dark fiction and the dead messing around with the living like we can see in the other stop motion animations he made like, The Night Before Christmas (1993) and Corpse Bride (2005) is also present here in this wonderful recreation of the Frankenstein story. Although unlike the two musical stop motion animation, Frankenweenie wasn’t a musical, but it was worth every minute.

The movie plot circles around a little boy, a genius by his own standard who saw his science teacher prove that muscle spasm can occur when you pass electricity through a corpse.

Now this little education of electricity was useful as young Victor just lost his dog Sparky. Sparky was his only friend and Victor’s connection to a world outside his head. Sparky was run over by a car when chasing a ball and the devastating effect of the loss led to Victor’s attempt to try and bring Sparky back.

He dug his dog out of the grave and sewed up the parts that had fallen off and did the Frankenstein experiment with lightning and a drop love Sparky came back to life.

Now hiding a dog is not as easy as Victor thought and soon, a classmate saw Sparky and demanded that Victor bring his goldfish back to life in other to buy his silence, which Victor did. But the classmate went about telling everyone Victor’s secret and the Kids in town went about bringing back to life their dead pets.

This movie is a classic horror comedy by its own right and the stop motion was more fluid than Burton’s previous attempts, but in the end the movie was not a commercial success even though it was a critical success.

In case you have missed seeing this movie in 2012, I can guarantee that if you do now, you will enjoy it.