A
version of this review appeared in The Age,
October 25, 2012.
Starring
a troupe of stop-motion puppets with wiry limbs, bulbous eyes and
death's-head grins, Tim Burton's reworking of his own short film
from 1984 may not be far off his usual artistic beat, but it's still
his most assured achievement since
Sweeney Todd in 2007.
As
often with Burton, the story contains an element of symbolic
autobiography. Young Victor Frankenstein, voiced by Charlie Tahan,
is a scientific genius and something of a misfit. His only friend is
his dog Sparky – and when Sparky is hit by a car, Victor refuses to
accept the death as final. Through no fault of his own, Victor's
experiments in corpse revival lead to horrific consequences, allowing Burton to prove that his trademark mock-Gothic images, with
their exaggerations of depth and scale, are perfectly suited to 3D.
In
his way, Burton resists the conventions of Hollywood animation as
boldly as Wes Anderson did in Fantastic Mr Fox. Many of his artistic
decisions seem deliberately anti-commercial, from the use of
black-and-white to the realistic close-ups of cat excrement.
Undeniably, some children will be scared or upset by Burton's warped
vision of everyday life: each
of Victor's classmates resembles some kind of monster, particularly the hunchbacked Edgar “E” Gore (excellently voiced
by 14-year-old Atticus Shaffer, who currently appears on TV's The
Middle).
Still,
this turns out to be one of Burton's most humanist films. The script
by John August defends the intellectual right to non-conformity while
suggesting that science, like art, should be driven not just by
curiosity but by compassion. Ultimately, it's clear that Victor is
the most sensible person in town, and that Burton's morbid humour
comes from a serious place: a child not yet accustomed to the idea of
death might well wonder how adults can think of anything else.
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