Tim Burton resurrects his pet project
In 1984, Tim Burton, a young animator / director working at Disney, made a thirty minute short about a boy who brings his dead dog back to life. His employers took one look at his mutant creation and promptly showed him the door.
Nearly thirty years on, and "Disney Presents" his feature length stop-motion reworking of that nascent project, and, after the wobbles of Alice In Wonderland and Dark Shadows, it's the most charmingly Burtonesque feature he's made in some time. Featuring all the hallmarks of his instantly recognisable style (crazy angles, spindly-legged bug-eyed protagonists, chiaroscuro lighting, all set against a fat-bottomed, shock-haired variant of 50s suburban Americana) writ large in animated form, but at the service of a simple, sweet-natured slice of gothic fantasy.
An amiable riff on the classic Frankenstein tale, the story of young Victor and his re-animated beloved pet doesn't really offer much meat to put on the bones of his short story. But it does deliver a sympathetic portrait of childhood out of whack with the mainstream and all the healthier for it (no doubt somewhat autobiographical, in feel at least if not in the corpse-meddling details). There's plenty of fun to be had soaking up the loving homages to the likes of Universal Studios 1930s back-catalogue, a classroom full of Boris Karloff and Lon Chaney lookalike kids chief among them, leading to a small-scale monster mash that takes much the same route as Wallace & Grommit's Curse Of The Were-Rabbit, and to similar grin-inducing effect. Ghoulish fun.
Rating: 3/5
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