I took my oldest to see Burton's Frankenweenie last week. I would say it's probably more Disney than Burton, but it is a charming homage to the classic monster cycles of both thirties Hollywood and fifties Japan, too. The film begins with a Super8 movie made by the protagonist, young Victor Frankenstein, who shows his creation to his loving but worried parents. The film is basically about an alien attack on a city, and it looks cheesy as a child's creation -- or some of the classic monster movies of a bygone era. The hero who saves the day is Victor's beloved dog, Sparky. As the film is projected in the living room, we see a piece of the strip burn up (a problem you don't have with digital projection). "I can fix that," Victor says, and proceeds to do so.
(Quick lesson, kids: when a film strip moves through the projector, if anything causes the film to stop for too long as it moves through the reels, the heat of the projector's lamp is often strong enough to burn the strip of film. The emulsions are no longer so dangerous that a fire can occur in the booth, but it is something projectionists had to handle. And that includes being able to repair the film strip to start again. In every booth, there's supposed to be a splicing apparatus.)
We see Victor take the segmented reels of his film back to his attic/studio, where he has the equipment needed to splice the Sparky movie together. This, then, becomes the central theme: relationship between the broken and the fixed. The burning of Sparky on film is a foreshadowing for the little pooch.
It is not a spoiler to tell you that Sparky dies; the premise of the film is that young Victor, inspired by his new science teacher (a wonderful turn by Ed Wood veteran Martin Landau), brings Sparky (get it?) back to life. The dramatic conflict comes when Victor tries to hide what he's done from his parents and his classmates, who all want to win the science competition.
The image of the small town suburban America may intend to evoke Eward Scissorhands, whose town is grotesque in its use of color and camera angles to portray that grotesqueness. Here, in black and white, and working with animation, Burton gives us a sense that everyone in the town is a bit weird; the landscape seems as dark as that of Burton's 1989 Batman, but with some of the sentimentality we feel for the misfits.
Another interesting question is one of time: when is this story set? We see Super8 movie equipment, but also talk about computers. It's really hard to get a handle on the time frame, and I wonder if that was deliberate.
Many of the same themes that one can find in Mary Shelley's novel are a part of the discourse here, but sanitized for the Disney audience. Science, the teacher tells Victor, comes from the heart as well as the head. And while the original Victor realizes the folly of his ways in messing around with playing God, the boy hero is allowed to rescue his dog, because, after all, what better love story is there than that between boy and dog? (Having the dog be the thing brought back to life also allows Burton to ignore the much more complex questions of morality that the Monster himself raises when he learns to read and think: he wishes to confront his creator and understand why he was put on this planet, just as Milton's Adam asks of the angel Gabriel concerning God.)
And ultimately, what Frankenweenie is about is not science per se; it's about movies and the life-giving qualities they give to us. When Victor prepares his experiment to revive Sparky electrically, yes, Burton is paying homage to the James Whale version of the novel, but in this kiddie-styled lab, the mechanics are re-worked items in the home; the moving wheels of Victor's bike power the machinery, and the sound of the spokes is the sound of the flickering of a film strip inside a camera (or projector). The movies are a transitional medium; that is, they combine elements of the mechanical media of typographic print (the sequential-ity of images) with electric power that can redefine perspectives. Is is the electricity of the light that projects the image unraveling before our eyes. In the early days of cinema, terms popular do describe the apparatus included bio-skop: the seeing of life. This was the shock of the new: seeing life, moving life, reappearing before one's eyes.
Film is a medium of preservation. Film critic Andre Bazin, in his essay "The Ontology of the Photographic Image," writes that cinema is a kind of mummification: it preserves the dead and allows them to live beyond the grave as it were. In the projection of the image, the dead rise again. Boris Karloff died in 1969, but his Monster comes to life every time the Whale films are screened. As electric media create an external central nervous system, one that is highly social, we understand why scientists (and novelists and film-makers) turn to electricity as a means -- or metaphor -- for bringing the dead back to life. Will Frankenweenie live beyond the grave? Audiences will decide that, but it certainly will appeal to the sentimentalist with a taste for the pop-culture macabre. (And speaking of macabre, look carefully at the grave markers in the pet cemetery; there's a deliciously sick reference to a certain Japanese kiddie phenomenon that might be worth the price of the ticket.)
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