Frankenweenie started out as a short film that Tim Burton made for Disney in 1984. Though this live action tale of a young boy resurrecting his dead dog worked as a good indication of the director’s slightly askew view of the world, it proved to be too morbid and creepifying for Disney’s sensibilities at the time, and it led to Burton being fired. That’s not the end of the story though. Many years and hundreds of millions of dollars that Burton films have earned for Disney later, the studio has decided to give the director another chance to revisit the Frankenweenie concept, this time as a feature length animated film.
The story here is fairly simple: Victor Frankenstein (Charlie Tahan) isn’t your typical child. He spends most of his time making monster movies in his attic with his loyal canine pal Sparky, and he doesn’t have many friends of his own species. That’s not really a problem though, because the kid seems pretty content living in his own world and hanging out with his dog. Things turn tragic though, when a run-in with an automobile ends Sparky’s life prematurely and some lessons in science class about lightning and the nervous system give Victor the idea that he might be able to bring his best friend back to life. Miraculously, the experiment works, but subsequent meddling from one of Victor’s classmates, Edgar ‘E’ Gore (Atticus Schaffer), leads to the project spinning out of control. Turns out, the act of reanimating corpses is not without its complications, and it’s not always the best idea to play God.
The problem with the film is, Burton doesn’t come up with enough of those complications to keep his story interesting. The subject of a young boy losing his only friend and refusing to accept that reality is an emotionally rich one, but Burton seems to struggle with how to stretch a tale that was originally a short out to feature length. Victor’s coping with a loss is the heart of the film, but it only takes up about 10-15 minutes of its run time. I haven’t seen the 30 minute short that this story started out as, but I’m willing to bet that 30 minutes feels like the perfect length when you watch it. What we get here is a character study with heart that takes up about 30 minutes, a whole lot of filler, and an action-packed finale that feels like a completely different film than the one we started out watching.
Admittedly though, that action-packed third act did do quite a bit to liven up a movie that stalls out in its middle. We go from a very small story about a boy and his dog to a very large one about an army of monsters attacking a town, and what was a somber and fairly depressing film suddenly becomes a lively popcorn flick. It hits like a shot of adrenaline to your heart, but the huge differences in tone between the first half and the second never get reconciled, and what you watch consequently ends up feeling less than whole. This feeling is pronounced when the big action subplot wraps itself up. You’d think that a film about a boy learning about and coming to terms with death would have a bittersweet ending, if not a downright tragic one, but not Frankenweenie. This is a movie that gets so wrapped up in its action movie aspirations that it forgets what sort of film it started out as and ends up wrapping itself up in the most mundane way possible. Does that seem appropriate for a children’s cartoon that had the nerve and the courage to make death its subject?
The biggest question you’ll have when coming out of Frankenweenie is just who exactly this film was supposed to be for. Animated family films are mostly approached as comedies, out of necessity, but the gags here are few and far between. The characters here are eccentric, but not in a wacky and fun way, mostly just in a morose, or downright depressing way. And the jokes that do show up are subtle references to classic horror films that are probably going to fly over the heads of the parents in the audience, let alone the kids. While the melancholy that surrounds the brief, family-pet-dying scenes is effective, the rest of the film just kind of sits there lifeless. There’s no wit here, no danger, and no sense of joy. The basic premise is one that would mostly appeal to old school film buffs, but the third act seems to be pandering to an audience of children who probably don’t have any interest in seeing a black and white cartoon in the first place. The film’s only appeal for the adults in the audience relies on them having nostalgia for old horror movies, and its only appeal for children seems to be that there’s a doggy running around and barking. In the end, neither is enough.
But let’s talk about the fact that it’s presented in black and white. It would be a shame to pick apart a Tim Burton movie and not address the way it looks. The praise for this filmmaker early in his career was that he was a visual genius, and the apologies for him later in his career have generally been that at least his films still look good; but somewhere around the point where he started doing remakes, even his visual style was starting to look one-trick and old-hat. Though it was a mess of a film, Dark Shadows took Burton a bit out of his element and had him working in a 70s design aesthetic instead of using the hallucinogenic take on gothic imagery that he often employs. It was nice to at least see him trying new things there, but, unfortunately, Frankenweenie sees him indulging, once again, in all of his tired, old fetishes.
The fact that Frankenweenie is presented in black and white accomplishes nothing other than maybe conjuring up a few seconds of nostalgia for the old Universal monster movies, and seems to be a needless wall between the film and a large part of its potential audience. And, like Burton’s Alice in Wonderland, the fact that it’s presented in 3D is practically an insult. No care was given to creating an immersive world here whatsoever. The 3D is practically non-existent, almost invisible, and can’t be seen as anything other than a greedy ploy to jack up ticket prices.
The biggest disappointment when it comes to the look of the film is probably how stale all of the actual design is though. Burton creates a pretty fun take on a pet cemetery: it’s foggy and moody and full of customized pet tombstones (including a bone-shaped tombstone for Sparky, put in the ground at a wicked slant, which, as Mark Borchardt will tell you, is how they should always look in horror movies). Other than that though, everything is so generically Burton-esque that you hardly even realize its there. The protagonist and the girl next door are thin, pale, dark-haired, and have dark circles under their eyes, seemingly just because that’s how Tim Burton characters are supposed to look (and Winona Ryder is even voicing the neighbor, Elsa Van Helsing, with the same mumbly, mopey voice she used for her character in Beetlejuice 25 years ago). The evil mayor looks like one of the villains from one of those 60s-era claymation Christmas specials, seemingly out of a necessity to make references to things from the past. This is all so typically Burton that it feels more like someone doing a lifeless mimicry of what he does than actual work from the man himself.
Frankenweenie needed a spark of passion, a script that reads like it was written by someone who cares (it was co-written by Burton’s regular collaborator, John August), and at least a smattering of relevancy. You can make references that go over kids’ heads for the sake of the parents in the audience, sure, but aiming all of your references at the grandparents seems to be pushing it. It could be fun to have your characters look like they were animated back in the 60s, certainly, but to have them speaking lifeless dialogue that feels like it came out of a cheesy old script from the 60s is just unacceptable. Frankenweenie casts comic actors as talented as Martin Short and Catherine O’Hara as the parents, and then gives them absolutely nothing to do. What’s the point?
Which, I guess, is the question at the heart of my response to this movie. Sure, there’s a touching moment here, and an interesting piece of design work there, but what was the point of Burton digging up a short film that he made decades ago and turning it into this bloated, half-baked feature? Apparently he inked the deals for Dark Shadows and Frankenweenie and worked on both films at the same time, and, unfortunately, it shows. Hopefully the next project he takes on is something he’s passionate about, that he takes the time to get right, and that he gives all of his focus to, because movies were meant to be made on a craftsman’s work bench, not on a factory’s assembly line. Frankenweenie is edible enough for a middling grade, but you’ll get no real joy from eating it.
