by Frank Calvillo
Disney and Pixar’s newest creation, Inside Out, came out this week, hoping to grab kids’ attentions and sell a good amount of tickets and merchandise before Minions descends next month.
The plot of Inside Out deals with a small girl’s move to a new city with her family and how her emotions (voiced by the likes of Bill Hader and Mindy Kaling) deal with the big changes it brings.
I can’t be too dismissive of Inside Out because of the innovative way it illustrates the conflicting feelings that children express when they go through monumental life changes for the first time. Here’s to hoping that Inside Out delivers on its story’s potential and that kids flock to see it.
Disney has a long history of churning out stories for children with the hopes that they’ll find them both relatable and entertaining. One of the more recent instances where the studio managed to pull off dealing with a profound life-altering childhood experience through animation was in Tim Burton’s Frankenweenie.
In 1950s suburbia, young Victor Frankenstein (Charlie Tahan) lives a solitary existence where the only two influences in his life are a love for making horror movies and a relationship with his dog/best friend Sparky. When Sparky dies in a car accident, Victor is grief-stricken and nothing that his parents (Martin Short and Catherine O’Hara) or his next door neighbor Elsa Van Helsing (Winona Ryder) do or say can make Victor feel better.
However, after learning about the power of electricity from Mr. Rzykruski’s (Martin Landau) science class, Victor manages to bring Sparky back to life. It isn’t long, though, before Victor’s classmates also wish to have their deceased pets back from the dead, leading to a frenzy which causes an uproar among the entire town.
Frankenweenie began life as a 1984 short film which was made toward the end of Burton’s time with Disney. Two decades later, the studio showed renewed interest in the story and entered into a deal with Burton to convert his short into a full-length animated feature. After a series of visually stunning yet polarizing remakes and adaptations, the chance to revisit one of his earlier creations, was a no-brainer for the offbeat director.
Burton may have surprised some by his decision that Frankenweenie be told in stop-motion animation, but he definitely shocked others when he announced the film would be in black and white just like the original short.
The result is one of the most visually stunning animated films in recent memory. Frankenweenie’s look is so in tune with the era in which it’s set it actually helps the amazingly crafted figures come alive in an even greater way. The film is obviously paying homage to those beloved creature features of the 1950s where science ran amok, and the B&W treatment certainly captures the right look, not to mention the appropriate amount of slight melancholy needed for the story’s emotions.
Burton loves re-teaming with actors from his past films. This time around, the cast is once again littered with virtually nothing but actors from past Burton outings including Winona Ryder (Beetlejuice, Edward Scissorhands), Martin Short (Mars Attacks!), Catherine O’Hara (Beetlejuice, The Nightmare Before Christmas), Martin Landau (Ed Wood) and Conchata Ferrell (Edward Scissorhands).
Where most actors struggle at trying to act with their voices, while attempting to still sound like themselves, Burton has the cast of Frankenweenie do anything but. Ryder doesn’t conjure up a little girl’s voice, but rather keeps her own for the role of fifth grader Elsa, while O’Hara and Short alter their voices between playing kind parents as well as other characters such as Weird Girl and Mayor Burgermeister, respectively. Both methods work surprisingly well, leading to some of the more interesting voice characterizations of any animated film.
Its a given that child audiences will always be drawn to animated films and as a result, such films have never ceased to convey the most fundamental life lessons in an effort to secure both kid and parent approval as well as box office dollars.
Frankenweenie, though, goes a bit bolder by tackling the issue of death. For most children, when a beloved pet dies, it’s usually one of the earliest traumatic events for anyone of a young age. It is often the first time death is experienced and it signifies the beginning of growing up. Frankenweenie’s heart and soul is that it acknowledges how hard such a moment is and the overwhelming desire to escape it and run back to the safety of the past. This is a film about shedding the scariness of saying goodbye to childhood and letting go of that which gives you grief.
There’s some commentary about how it’s okay to be different thrown in (in its own way it is comforting that there are no “normal” kids in Victor’s class), but Burton has always been a filmmaker more bent on injecting the purest of human emotions into films filled with captivating visuals than anything else.
2012 was not a banner year for Burton. His take on the cult gothic soap-opera Dark Shadows was a mixed bag that had the unfortunate timing of being released on the heels of The Avengers, while the Burton-produced Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter came and went without much fanfare. By the time Frankenweenie was released, it was forced to compete with two other horror-themed animated titles: Paranorman and Hotel Transylvania, which left the the B&W film about a child’s love for his dead pet with a decidedly slim take at the box-office.
Ironically though, critics truly loved Frankenweenie and the film earned Burton some of the best reviews he’d had in years along with awards from the likes of both New York and Los Angeles film critics associations, among others, and an Oscar nomination for Best Animated film. Critics have always loved it when Burton tackles animated projects and immediately placed Frankenweenie alongside the likes of Corpse Bride and The Nightmare Before Christmas as a true Burton triumph.
My hope is that someday Frankenweenie will be held up in the same light as some of Burton’s more popular titles. The director has always prided himself on bringing to life stories of weirdos and misfits steeped in worlds full of darkness and oddities. Yet with Frankenweenie, he crafted a film about one of the most influential life experiences which touches all of us at one point or another, weirdo or not.
