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| From Collider.com |
Last week, the students of The World of Tim Burton
seminar kicked back to Frankenweenie. The
animation is a remake of the director’s first short film created in 1984. That
same year, Disney decided not to
collaborate with animator Tim Burton because they considered his live action
short to be too dark and too frightening for children. I disagree with this
statement because at the core of the movie, one can see that is simply a tale
of a boy and his dog. A lonely and misunderstood child loses the one thing that
is important to him, his canine friend. The dog was a faithful companion to the
child, and he was also the comical star of the boy’s home movies. But now that
the dog is gone is sufficiently tear-jerking. The young scientist’s stitching
and attaching together of parts of his dog after it has been dead proves to be
heartfelt and touching rather than dark and scary. Burton went back to the
drawing board, and he decided to reprise the short using a new medium, stop-motion;
he also expanded the short in to a full-length film, adding in an hour of silly
drama and incident. It was not until 2012 that the franchise united with the gothic
director to produce his stop-motion-animated, black-and-white, 3D film
Frankenweenie.
In the movie, the director channels the classic tale
of Mary Shelley’s Frankestein by putting
an elementary spin on it with Victor Frankenstein. Victor is a young, alienated
student who is an avid lover of film-making and the subject of science. His
partner in crime is his hyperactive canine friend Sparky. Early in the movie,
Sparky is hit by a car and killed after he went chasing after a baseball into
traffic. Inspired by his wicked yet passionate science teacher, Victor becomes
a mad scientist, and he works diligently to bring his friend back to life. The
stitched-up Sparky rises from the grave, and this miracle then inspires Victor’s
classmates to do the same with figures of their past. This chaos turns the
little suburban town into the perfect setting of an old-time horror movie.
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| From IGN.com |
The difference between the 1984 version and 2012
version is that the early work features live action while the latter is in stop-motion
animation. The advantage of using live actors is the audience can sense the
level of realism, and the actions are more convincing; however, this proves to
be a disadvantage for animation in that it causes a slight disconnection from the
audience to the characters because the audience reminds itself that the movie
is just an animation. The disadvantage with live action is that the viewers
form certain images in their minds about what the characters will look like and
how they will act. But once they see the movie, they are often dissatisfied that
the characters do not take after the thoughts formed in their heads; an
automatic disconnection is present there. An advantage with stop-motion animation
is that there are no limits to the action. The characters will not interfere
with the preconceived notations formed with live action movies.
To conclude, Frankenweenie was a great remake of the
live action short from 1984. The touching tale depicted relationship drama
about the love between a boy and his dog. It is a brilliant creation in that
the emotional range is wide. It is very gloomy in some parts, but the humor
overshadows the darkness; the sympathy does so as well. Victor’s longing for
Sparky is heartfelt. After witnessing that, he does not seem like a strange and
crazy scientist; he is just boy who misses his best friend.
