Review of Frankenweenie (2012) by Oz S — 26 Sep 2013

I expected this to be so much better, instead what I got was really underwhelming. The story, I had figured out in seconds. It's your typical pet-gets-killed-kid-misses-it-and-then -pet-returns movie with a pretty cool scientific experimentation to it.

However, I never quite got the resurrection of the dead factor in it and when this story wasn't predictable, it was flat out offbeat and just boring. The side characters are animated more like Burton fan-fiction than anything for a movie and just have nothing going for them.

Though I will say the animation here is pretty good. It's your pre-Oz black and white world with a lot of realistic looking gimmicks. Then you have the climax, which is the real downer. Not only do we have new resurrected animals, they are these weird mutations that dont make sense.

The white cat looks like a flying monkey mixed with a bat along with a Godzilla turtle and for lack of a better term "Gremlins". And on top of that, the dog actually does live in the end. What the heck? If there is anything Tim Burton is good at, it's making us accept death's inevitability in a creative fashion as we saw with something like Corpse Bride.

But how is this kid going to learn anything about the mortality of mankind? That we will all return to dust? Yeah, this story isn't very good. If for nothing else, go see it for the visual effects.

They are always a lot of fun.