Tim Burton brings back the dead in ‘Frankenweenie’

Director Tim Burton decided to take a break from working with his more recent standby actors — Johnny Depp and wife Helena Bonham Carter — for the film Frankenweenie, opting instead for old friends he hasn’t worked with for some time.  

The black-and-white, stop-motion animated film which displays Burton’s trademark morbid curiosity is reminiscent of the filmmaker’s earlier works, like the now classic Nightmare Before Christmas, Beetlejuice, and Edward Scissorhands. Frankenweenie is a fun and kid-driven version of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and the 1931 James Whale-directed film of the same name. It is also based on a live-action short that Burton created early in his career, in 1984.  

Speaking to Reuters recently, Tim Burton said his upbringing in Burbank, Calif., seeps into every film he makes and the characters he writes.  

“Well, I try to pick everything, like make it ‘I remember this type of kid, I remember this type of kid, I remember a weird girl,” Burton said of the characters he concocts for his films. “And I try to [lump] in monster movies, putting in reference to classic monster films, because I always related those things to my real life. So everything, even the places, I tried to make more like what Burbank was in my memory of it growing up. So it was a real memory piece to liken everything to something real that I remember.”

Frankenweenie tells the story of a young Victor Frankenstein, who loves and misses his dead dog Sparky, and gets the idea to reanimate his corpse from a schoolteacher’s class demonstration on electricity. His grand experiment to reawaken Sparky is a surprise success — though it comes at a cost. Eventually, the word gets out and all hell breaks loose as Victor’s secret emerges.

Actress Winona Ryder plays Elsa Van Helsing, young Victor Frankenstein’s next door neighbor and love interest, and said that working with Tim Burton again was an easy “yes.” She previously starred in Edward Scissorhands and Beetlejuice.

“I’d been hearing about Frankenweenie, she said.  “Of course I had seen the short 25 years ago, and so I knew the short, and I knew that it was a very personal thing for him, about his relationship with his dog. And so that was huge, to be asked to be part of something so personal, you know. I was like, ‘Really?’  But yeah, literally, he could call me and ask me to do anything and I would say yes, because he is that much, it’s like going home for me.”
 
Burton also brought in old friends Martin Short (Mars Attacks) and Catherine O’Hara (Beetlejuice, The Nightmare Before Christmas) to portray several characters, primarily Victor’s parents, in Frankenweenie.

“On a project like this, it was nice to work with people like Catherine O’Hara and Martin Short and Winona Ryder, and Martin Landau, people that I love and have worked with but haven’t worked with in a while,” Burton said. “Martin and Catherine, they do like three voices each, because they’re so great in it, and it’s such a creative thing to see them.”

The trio is so close that before voice work started on Frankenweenie, Short played a prank on O’Hara that had the possibility of going awry.

“I phoned Catherine, because at one point there was talk that we would go to London to record, and I phoned Catherine [posing] as Tim as a joke,” Short said. “‘Hey Catherine, it’s Tim. I’m so happy that you could do this,’ and she was…”

“Totally buying it,” O’Hara interrupted.

“Totally buying it, and I couldn’t believe she was buying it, and I was panicked and didn’t know what else to say,” Short said. “And then I started to talk about ‘I’m not sure about Martin, I think we made a mistake going in that direction.’

“And what do you say to Tim Burton if he says, ‘Your great friend Marty, who you thought you were going to be working with, he’s not sure he should be in the movie,’” O’Hara said.

“Um, really Tim?  Really?”

“She went ‘really?’ Short said. “And then I was afraid she was going to say ‘I was kind of thinking that too.’”

Frankenweenie opened in theatres Friday.