Tim Burton has spent his entire filmmaking career
searching for the magic of those old science fiction and horror films of the
1950s and 1960s. That’s the stuff he grew up on and it obviously touched him on
a personal level because almost everything he does pays homage in some way to
them. Ed Wood is both biography and
homage to the director of the cheapest “so bad it’s good” B-movies. His latest
film, and first stop-motion animation as director, is Frankenweenie, which happens also to be a remake of an early short
film he made in 1984, before he ever stepped behind the camera for a
full-length feature. The original short film runs 25 minutes and stars Daniel
Stern and Shelley Duvall as the parents of a boy who loves his dog, Sparky, and
directing cheap 8mm films in the back yard (like Burton did as a boy). After
the dog dies in an accident, the boy uses science to reignite life in his dead
beloved, much to the dismay of the townspeople, who, in the spirit of Frankenstein, burn down an old windmill
in an attempt to destroy the grotesquery of resurrected death.
