Frankenweenie (2012)

I love Tim Burton.  I’ve been slacking off a bit on the more recent movies that he’s made.  I haven’t seen last year’s Dark Shadows yet, but I intend on owning all his movies and I do own quite a few as of now.  If I wanted to do a Tim Burton marathon, it would be pretty much successful.  The newest animation from Tim Burton is the film version of his short from early on in his directing.   I’ve been looking forward to watching this a while…

Director: Tim Burton

Cast: Catherine O’Hara, Martin Short, Martin Landau, Charlie Tahan, Atticus Shaffer, Winona Ryder, James Hiroyuki Liao, Robert Capron

This is a story of a young boy and his dog.  When Victor Frankenstein(Charlie Tahan) loses his dog Sparky, under the inspiration of his new science teacher Mr. Ryzkruski’s (Martin Landau) lesson in class, he decides to use electricity to bring Sparky back to life.  However, he knows that Sparky can’t be revealed and he tries to hide him.  Beyond his control, Sparky ends up wandering around the neighborhood and get seen by his fellow classmates, Edgar (Atticus Shaffer) who then leaks it to Toshiaki (James Hiroyuki Liao) and a few others, who get inspired to change the odds of their chances in the coming science fair and experiments with something that ends up more than they bargained for, the town learns the difference between the good and bad in science.

Tim Burton is definitely great at stop-motion animation.  This is Burton to the core, reaching back to a him that I haven’t seen in his recent works in a long time.  It was missed and this was energetic and passionate piece of work.  The black and white filming really gave it a nice touch and kept it eerie but fun.  Only Burton can actually bring that in, especially when he tosses up the character designs and gives a lot of them some really weird or evil or gentle looks to show their personality.

Victor Frankenstein showed such awesome personality and passion for his project as he learned more about science in itself along with its consequences, we also learn and feel as he loses and fights to keep this best friend with him.  We suffer the loss of losing a pet and a part of our family.  In this animation, Victor doesn’t get all the credit though.  Just the classmates involved each had their own charm and magic, whether they were hardcore or mean and he gave it a nice twist by making the characters multicultural.  Plus, it was a mix of evil and some look bad but wasn’t really that bad, some was purely weird and then we have genuinely nice but left out.  All the children was voiced very energetically.

It was definitely a fun film.  My favorite character had to be Mr. Ryzkruski because he was so blunt and not caring about his consequences.  He was the mentor and inspiration of Victor even till the very end.  Plus, Winona Ryder’s Elsa was really great also.  It was a captivating animation.  There was a charm that really kept this movie engaging the whole time.

Definitely great watch! If you are a Tim Burton fan, this is definitely a must-see! You can see his passion and energy just by how he perfectly sets everything up.  I loved it! The story was totally awesome, the physical character designs were fitting and they were voiced enthusiastically.  All around fun film.  It never gets too serious even when we hit the peak but it also teaches us lessons and even hits on little signs from the original Frankenstein novel.  It has a lot of style especially with the black and white.

Loved it to bits! 🙂

Whats your Tim Burton fave? Did you like Frankenweenie? Are you a Tim Burton fan?