2 stars (out of four)
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Frankenweenie, a new
black-and-white claymation movie from Tim Burton, opens with its young
protagonist, a boy named Victor Frankenstein (voiced by Charlie Tahan),
screening a homemade movie for his parents. A plastic bat terrorizes a town
made of cardboard boxes while horribly outmatched toy army men battle it.
Suddenly, the family dog, Sparky, makes a cameo and saves the town, happily
chewing up the monster.
There are moments in Frankenweenie that have the endearing feel of a boy playing with
his toys, as though Mr. Burton had stumbled across the clay figurines used in
the film and started imagining a story with them. (All of the character
designs, particularly a morose science teacher with quite the long face and the
voice of Martin Landau, are delightful.)
But just as often the film’s low-key vibe feels scattershot.
As the movie jumps from one half-formed idea to the next, it feels less like
the off-the-cuff imaginings of a child than a lack of inspiration from a director
who has a good idea but doesn’t know what to do with it.
After a patient set-up introducing us to Victor and his
parents (dryly voiced by Martin Short and Catherine O’Hara), the story begins
in earnest when Sparky gets run over by a car. Victor, ever the inventor and
amateur scientist, decides to harness the power of lightning to resurrect the
poor pooch for a science fair project.
The problem with Frankenweenie is that I’ve already described all the essential plot points.
Everything that follows is fluff. There are occasional sprinklings of inspired
slapstick but no jolt of energy on the order of that which brings the titular
canine back to life. This is not the tragic story of Mary Shelley’s original
tale but rather an intermittently playful (if ultimately tepid) tribute to the
shadowy gothic imagery of classic horror films and to the campy pleasures of
old monster movies.
Frankenweenie is
based on an early Tim Burton short and this feature-length version bears the
stretch marks of a script padded in order to meet a minimum running time.
Screenwriter John August adds a few middling subplots and tangents but all he
really does is slow down the fun. The movie comes alive when Sparky slip-slides
down a roof in pursuit of a bug-eyed neighborhood cat but is as stiff as a
corpse when Victor’s father, in an attempt to bond with his son and add some
human interest to the movie, encourages the boy to play sports.
Tim Burton’s movies rarely look bad and Frankenweenie’s crisp animation indulges in long shadows and dark
suburban streets lit up by bolts of lightning. But though Tim Burton may be a
lively visual artist, his storytelling is far too often as anemic as the pallid
faces of his characters. As a result, this monster mash ends up being rather
lifeless.
- Steve Avigliano, 10/16/12
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