Frankenweenie 2012
I knew about this movie, but I think because I wasn’t that impressed with Tim Burton’s The Corpse Bride that I didn’t want to see another gray stop motion movie. But this movie doesn’t have anything to do with that one and actually may be my favorite Tim Burton movie since for me his movies never seem to realize their offbeat potential. The Blu-ray disk includes the original live action short film that Burton did for Disney that got him fired, which this movie is based on, but the stop action animation and more fleshed out story works better at feature length. There are definitely issues, like who the intended audience is (a kid’s movie that isn’t really for kids, which is perfect for me anyway). But it does a great job of being an homage to the original Frankenstein story while having a lot of fun with reanimation of animals. Borrowing heavily from the original, it would be better not to watch the short beforehand because it will ruin the full length movie’s plot. Even though the movie is based on common elements, everything is done well and it is fun to watch the plot and characters develop. The dog at the center of the story, Sparky, is a little sad and seems mostly frightful and neglected, but he is brave when he needs to be and things turn out okay.
The extras are good showing a decent amount of detail about the stop motion process and the models they use. Since the dog was one of the main characters, they had to make the dog model big enough to animate which meant the scale of everything else had to be bigger than normal. But the result is a richer production featuring more detail, even though it is all black and white. Some time lapse photography shows the crew working on a set as a team spends all day getting a few seconds of film.
Written: 14 Sep 2019
Owned on: Blu-ray, DVD