Burton’s reanimated pet project, By Nigel Andrews

Lexical substitutions: PRACTICE (20-26/10/2012) Exercise #2

Exercise #1

Exercise #3

October 18, 2012 5:33 pm

Burton’s reanimated pet project, By Nigel Andrews

This week’s new film releases reviewed: Tim Burton’s ‘Frankenweenie’, ‘5 Broken Cameras’, ‘Beasts of the Southern Wild’, ‘Ginger and Rosa’ and ‘Madagascar 3: Europe’s Most Wanted’

You can’t manufacture charm. It’s an accidental product. It needs innocence and good-heartedness and the incandescent power to project both. It’s like the power of old cinema: whirr, shine, glow, flicker, enchant. Tim Burton’s Frankenweenie has so much charm it should be declared a danger zone. We are in charm’s way from start to finish. The pre-digital-style model animation – in black and white – is childlike, gawky, funny and irresistible.

The mock-gothic story of 10-year-old Victor, who reanimates his dog Sparky (killed by a car) in a Frankenstein-style lab in the family attic, then finds his science secrets co-opted by schoolmates who reanimate all their pets (with disastrous results), may seem familiar if you are a deep-cover veteran film nut. DCVFNs will know that Burton filmed this story as a live-action short for Disney in 1984. Disney suppressed it as too gruesome for kids; now the studio has turned a pariah into a payday. The animation helps. Nothing is fearful here that isn’t funny and endearing too: from Victor’s Vincent Price-lookalike schoolteacher to the revitalised Sparky, a bouncy bull terrier with pin-bright eyes who is more appealing, if anything, with his patches, stitches and neck bolts.

As you’d expect from Burton, completing an unofficial animation trilogy (The Nightmare Before Christmas, Corpse Bride), every human character wears the haunted look this director loves. Wide eyes dark-rimmed with insomnia; noddy-toy necks atop gangling limbs; tiny mouths pursed as if to protect those secrets, joyful or appalling, that each of us carries from birth to death and in gothic tales back again. Clinching the film’s spell is its implied exhortation to the kid in each of us. Do try this at home. Do try bringing your dog back to life. Do tell your parents where to get off, if they want you to play baseball instead of following your science boffin dreams. Above all, do open the roof of your soul and expose your imagination to the electrical storms of life. That way, you might turn into Tim Burton, or at the least into your fullest, most creative self.

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