Review: Tim Burton's Frankenweenie

You have to admire the sheer stick-to-itiveness of Tim Burton, the director of this week’s stop-motion family horror pic Frankenweenie. It’s a Disney-backed adaptation of one of his own shorts, one that incidentally got him fired from Disney way back in 1984, and the big-eyes plus spirals aesthetic that permeates his film is almost that old as well. He found a look he likes, and for good or ill, he’s going with it.

Thankfully, Frankenweenie, with its perceptibly hand-crafted feel, stark black-and-white photography and occasionally–surprisingly–dark script feels like a good home for Burton’s well-worn visual shtick. And hey, one of the good things about being a kid is that this stuff might seem... less stale than it does to people that have been watching Burton's spider-people wear spirals for twenty-five years.

Set in the same kind of post-war bungalow suburb that he explored in Edward Scissorhands, Frankenweenie sees young Victor Frankenstein bringing his beloved pet Sparky back to life, hoisted on an ironing board into the night sky above the attic he normally uses to film his own stop-motion monster films.

 

Once Sparky is back, though, complete with patchwork hide and detachable tail, Victor must keep his resurrected pooch a secret, lest a gang of science fair-bound neighborhood kids led by Edgar “E” Gore discover it and try to replicate it to disastrous results.

Frankenweenie is almost a frame-by-frame rejection of the monsters-made-stupid crap that made last week’s Hotel Transylvania such an overwhelming chore. It’s not a perfect kids’ film–Pixar’s lately raised the bar so high on that front that it’s hard to even see anymore­ Burton still struggles with pacing–but Frankenweenie is nonetheless a great kids’ film. It’s at its heart a boy and his dog story, and a touching one at that, one that illustrates perfectly the love a boy can have for a pet and, ultimately, what a pet can do to deserve that love. It’s occasionally more than a little scary and even when it’s not it’s suffused with the kind of dangerous awesome creepiness that a lot of safe kids’ filmmakers hold out as anathema.

That there aren’t a lot of jokes in Frankenweenie isn’t a mark against it. In fact it’s just the opposite: this is a film that feels utterly sincere in its mission to pay homage to the Frankenstein mythos, and it’s all the more pleasurable for its lack of archness and snarky asides. It’s a spooky, charming pleasure, and an antidote entirely for parents sick of the frenetic, dance-scene-having pop-culture-obsessed stuff that passes for kids’ fare too often recently.