"Your dog is alive!"
Frankenweenie (2012) is children's stop-motion animated horror film. When Victor Frankenstein's best (and only) friend, his dog Sparky, dies he gets the idea to try and bring it back to life.
This movie had a some surprisingly good world building going on, somebody did a good job of focusing on that and doing a lot of research. I liked the simple story in this film, I found it fun and interesting and not too convoluted. Also the story was very dark and really (for the most part) didn't hold back because it was a film for kids. I think this film did a great job of really capturing a lot of the same type of horror that the old universal movies did, which is really cool.
Also found it cool that this film has a lot of really cool references to Tim Burton's personal inspirations including Nosferatu, Christopher Lee as Dracula, Godzilla and obviously like all of the Universal monster movies and there's even a Hitchcockian Vertigo-shot in there I saw. I really enjoyed these.
I get that this is part of the "look" and design of the characters but I really didn't like how blank and emotionless some of the characters looked for a majority of the film. Victor especially, this is our main character and honestly for most of the movie I had no idea what he was thinking, he just had this blank neutral look on his face. This is something that you need to fight in animation, you want to make people forget that they're not watching real actors. Letting the design get in the way of that is pretty weak.
The movie is pretty slow for the first half, I feel like if I didn't have my love for monsters and horror I would have been pretty bored. Not sure if more interesting things needed to happen or if the characters should be more interesting or if they just could have used some more humor in the first half. Also I feel like they could have set up the friendship of Victor and Sparky in the beginning better. Instead we get shots of Victor not taking the dog outside when he wants to go and the dog playing fetch by himself, someone didn't think that one through.
And lastly I feel like the resolution in the end doesn't fit everything the characters went through and learned throughout the span of the movie. It works as a happy Disney ending but otherwise, not.
Best thing about this movie though is the really really well developed and detailed sets and how freaking great the lighting is on said sets. I was thinking about why this film doesn't feel like a stop-motion film when you're watching it, and I think this is due in great part to the awesome lighting.
And the animation is good too, probably nothing mind blowing but what I enjoyed is there's a lot of shots that you normally don't see in a stop-motion film like full body shots of multiple people walking or wide shots with a lot of people in frame because of the technical difficulty of these things. But I appreciate how this film didn't shy away from any of those shots because they're too hard.
Frankenweenie (2012) is good, but if you're a fan of monster movies or Tim Burton's films from the 90's you should definitely check it out. 4/5 stars.
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