Frankenweenie

Frankenweenie was originally a 30-min short black-and-white film by Tim Burton.  A young boy Victor shot a movie clip with his beloved dog Sparky as the lead battling an evil bat.  Sparky was knocked down by a car when it dashed out of the house.  It was buried in a pet cementary.

During a science class, Victor was fascinated by the science teacher applying electricity to a dead frog and proceeded to resurrect his god with lightning.  Obviously, the neighbours viewed Sparky as a freak.  Victor followed the escaped Sparky to a windmill and was caught in the fire that broke out.  Sparky saved Victor and the neighbours then resurrected the "dead" Sparky once again with their cars.

The 2012 version of Frankenweenie is now an 88min black-and-white stop-motion picture with added details to flash out the relationship between Victor and Sparky better.  The film also poked fun at the parents' ignorance and fear of the science teacher who had sparked their children's interest.  The science teacher was fired and the science class taken over by the gym teacher who "wasn't even interested in science".  At the carpark, the science teacher told Victor :In my country, even the road sweeper is a scientist!".  That was in strong constrast to Victor's father, a travel agent who "sells people dreams and what they don't need".  A not-too-subtle analogy to the investment bankers today, perhaps?

There were quite a few references to popular culture in the movie, such as Victors' classmate Edgar Gore who bears a resemblance to the Hunchback of Notre dame and was rather macabre in choosing a rat from the rubbish dump to resurrect as his science project.

Toshiaki, another boy in Victor's class, is the typical asian student who aims for the top prize for the science project.  He resurrected his pet tortoise Shelly which grew so huge it became a tortoise-zilla, terrorising the New Holland celebrations, much like Godzilla.  The other students also resurrected their dead or alive pets with disasterous results, with Victor and the still loyal Sparky to put things right in the end.

All in all, an enjoyable film, and being in black-and-white and stop-motion makes the film even more nostalgic, especially when children in the movie were not glued to their smart devices.  I didn't watch the Corpse Bride, but I thought the shape of the faces of the characters in Frankenweenie were rather similar to those in Corpse Bride.

I do hope Frankenweenie gets popular enough for an exhibition of the puppets to be displayed here.

http://disney.go.com/frankenweenie/