"History is a nightmare from which I'm trying to awake." - James Joyce

Monday, October 8, 2012

Hey, here's a really cool film I saw over the weekend: "Frankenweenie." It's another stop-motion animation effort from Tim Burton along the same lines as "The Nightmare Before Christmas." The visuals are incredible: the animation just right, not smooth but a tiny bit jerky to emphasize the older subject matter. The characters (including their names - the main character, the boy, is Victor Frankenstein) create the feeling that they live in the alternate universe of old monster movies. I particularly like the science teacher, a dead-ringer for Vincent Price. It brings to mind old tv shows like "The Munsters" and "The Addams Family" in that it places these old monster tropes within a "normal" milieu. Aside from the fun, there's a small sidebar where the science teacher encounters the fear and ignorance of the townspeople and he gets off a few shots about their irrational fear of science. Great! Add to all this another iconic Danny Elfman score and we have the best Burton film in quite a while. I heartily recommend this entertaining flick...

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