As the title suggests, Frankenweenie is a riff on Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein and its numerous cinematic incarnations. The protagonist is Victor (natch), a young outcast who doesn’t mind his outcast status at all (he is sweetly voiced by Charlie Tahan). Victor lives in a small town called New Holland, which, in typical Burton fashion, is populated with endearing oddballs and weirdos (one of the film’s best visual jokes is the random assortment of strung-out-looking kids in Victor’s classroom, particularly a spacey girl whose equally spacey looking cat supposedly foretells the future in his litter box). Victor’s best friend is his dog Sparky, who he casts in the homemade sci-fi/monster movies he shoots in his backyard (the fact that he still shoots on film and edits his movies in the attic upstairs with a negative cutter and glue is testament to Burton’s continued adoration of the cinematic past). His mother (Catherine O’Hara) appreciates Victor’s ingenuity and creativity, while his father (Martin Short) worries that his preoccupations are a little, well, weird. In an effort to get his son more in line with the mainstream, he convinces him to play baseball, which leads directly to Sparky’s untimely death by car when he chases after Victor’s homerun hit.

Determined to resurrect his best friend, Victor takes to heart school lessons about electricity taught by his eccentric science teacher Mr. Rzykruski (Martin Landau, manically and hilariously channeling every Eastern European mad scientist to ever cross the silver screen) and sets up his own laboratory in the attic. He successfully brings Sparky back from the dead, although unlike other Frankenstein stories in which the “monster” is monstrous, Victor’s resurrected canine bud is his old happy, energetic self. Victor rightly recognizes that his reanimated dog might not go over so well with others (especially his parents), so he endeavors to hide the stitched-together pooch. Unfortunately, his scientific success is discovered by Edgar ‘E’ Gore (Atticus Shaffer), a hunchback classmate who spills the beans to other kids at the school, all of whom are vying to win the upcoming science fair. Thus, they all set up their own pet-resurrecting experiments, which leads to Godzilla-like disaster.

Befitting its look and tone, Frankenweenie has an interesting history that can tell us much about what is considered “acceptable” in “family” entertainment. Back in 1984, when Burton was a lowly animator and struggling filmmaker trying to get noticed at the Disney studio, he made a live-action short film version of Frankenweenie that starred The NeverEnding Story’s Oliver Barrett as Victor and Shelley Duvall and Daniel Stern as his parents. It was shot in black-and-white and featured numerous clever allusions to the classical horror canon (especially James Whale’s Frankenstein), but was yanked from playing before the re-release of Pinocchio (1941) when the MPAA rated it PG, citing the film’s tone (apparently they failed to notice the grim tone of the G-rated Pinocchio, with its stark fatalism and disturbingly horrific moments). Burton’s film did finally see the light of day on video in 1992 (albeit in slightly edited form) after Burton had become an A-list director with Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure (1985), Beetlejuice (1988), Batman (1989), and Edward Scissorhands (1990), the latter of which shares Frankenweenie’s emotional core.

And it is precisely the film’s emotionality that makes it work. There is plenty to say about Frankenweenie’s wonderfully bizarre imagery and off-kilter character, but it only works because Burton and screenwriter John August (in their fifth collaboration) invest the film with a sense of genuine love and affection, not just for the classical horror movies they’re referencing, but for the characters and their situations. We feel for sweet, sad-eyed Victor, not because he’s a morose social outcast (he seems quite happy with his outsider status because it allows him to pursue his interests), but rather because we understand the trauma of losing his best friend and all that entails. While Shelly’s Victor Frankenstein was a driven egotist determined to play God, Burton’s Victor just wants his dog back, and who could blame him? The character designs are all fantastically skewed in a way that could only be described as Burtonesque (the look reminded me of his wonderful 1982 animated short Vincent about a boy who obsesses over Vincent Price and Edgar Allen Poe), but never at the expense of the emotional truths each character represents. Unlike the recently released Hotel Transylvania, which exploits old horror movie monsters for rapid-fire mayhem, Frankenweenie digs into the horror mythos and revels in the true heart that beats endearingly beneath.

Copyright ©2013 James Kendrick

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