Shocking the cradle
Burton gives childhood innocence a dark, gothic twist
Frankenweenie 3D (Devonshire, Lakeshore, Silver City) PG ★★★ ½/5
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OVING an animal reconnects us to a lost sense of childhood innocence, when love was pure and unconditional, and the concept of death just a fairy-tale necessity for bad people.
When we lose a pet, that sliver of sweet paradise regained goes with it, leaving us wandering around east of Eden once more, a stumbling, bumbling, naked bag of water, conscious of sin and our flaws.
It’s our own innocence we mourn as much as the missing furry friend, which is why Hollywood’s glittering highway is littered with roadkill: You can get to the very root of the adult-child divide with a ready-made chunk of sympathy sitting obediently in the middle.
Tim Burton knows how to spin cinematic treacle into dark molasses, so it’s no surprise that Frankenweenie feels like Edward Gorey on Prozac.
Animated using gloriously tactile stop-motion characters, the film centres its plot on Victor Frankenstein (voiced by Charlie Tahan), a science geek who has only one best buddy in the whole wide world: His bull terrier, Sparky.
When Victor tries to please his parents by attending the local baseball game, some good luck proves tragic when Sparky suddenly meets his maker.
Victor is understandably bereft. All joy has been vacuumed up alongside the last remaining Sparky hairs on the couch. Without a friend, he focuses on school, particularly his science class with a pragmatic European professor.
The teacher, who looks like Vincent Price but speaks like Bela Lugosi (thanks to voice actor Martin Landau), explains the adult world of physics and chemistry to the snotty-nosed brats before him. Only Victor seems moved by the message of knowledge, but he takes it in his own, problematic, direction.
The little Frankenstein realizes the nerves and circuitry of the dead still function and immediately hatches a plan to spark up Sparky.
Now, there’s a reason why horror movies are not for kids. Any notion of gore and re-animated corpses is generally reserved for teenagers and people who own nothing but T-shirts.
Watching an animal lie lifeless on screen is one thing. But digging up the body in the middle of the night — even if it is wrapped in a towel — seems a tad too macabre as a thought, let alone an image on screen.
One might think there’s comfort to be found in the highly unreal look of the whole exercise. Sparky looks like a stuffed piece of felt — perhaps even a high-end flannel. Yet, because Burton is such a clever director, we’re pulled into the emotional quicksand, where the only escape leads to moral quagmire.
One minute we are grieving next to Victor. The next, we’re horrified at the kid’s ability to make his beloved pet the object of an unnatural science experiment. At least, I think we should be.
Burton escapes the slip knot of judgment because this is a story about a boy and his dog, as well as a nod to classic gothic horror. Dr. Frankenstein was a boy at one point in his life, and this is Burton’s winking attempt to make him entirely human — by turning him into a piece of fabric and resin, and animating him one frame at a time.
It’s such an endlessly delightful circle of cinematic homage that it’s hard to resist Frankenweenie, even when it gets morosely dark and even, somewhat surprisingly, overly sappy.
Burton salvages his dignity as a filmmaker because he’s ultimately conscious of what he’s doing. And that’s where Frankenweenie gets positively black, because in keeping with Hollywood tradition, Frankenstein has to violate the natural laws.
In denying death, we deny the very core of our humanity. Yet, our current culture is obsessed with overcoming the ultimate end that gives our lives meaning.
Frankenweenie may look like kids’ entertainment, but in fiddling with this natural order, Burton throws up a very dark mirror to our childhood soul — where innocence isn’t lost in a memorable and life-defining moment of sorrow, but continuously electrocuted on the new wire fence surrounding paradise.
Creepy, clever and downright disturbing, Burton’s movie achieves what only great fairy tales can: It creates an entire fantasy world that resonates as contemporary satire.