movies: frankenweenie

A very big (sarcastic) thank you to the two groups of Gen Y 20-somethings who believed that it was okay to talk amongst themselves during the screening of Frankenweenie tonight... between that and your coughing and general wriggling around, you managed to ruin my movie going experience.

As such, I'm not completely sure that I know how I feel about Tim Burton's latest stop motion animated movie.

The movie is a full length adaptation of one of Burton's stop motion short movies from 1984 that essentially riffs on the story of Frankenstein.

Having flicked through the original short after we came back from the movie  there are a number of shots that are essentially reproduced in the new movie, however there are a range of new characters in this new version.

I'm not sure it works completely successfully to be honest. I get that Burton is making a lot of in-jokes and references to very old horror movies, the fact that it's in black and white definitely puts you in that mind-set, but I found myself caring less and less as the movie progressed.

Whether that was because of the distractions in the theatre or not, but I felt like there were far too many additional characters, a number of whom weren't really important to the story. They just seemed to be the typical Burton quicky character rather than them being essential.

I also felt like the movie lacked heart... or possibly it didn't use the off-kilter gothic nature of the original. Either way, it seemed to be a little bit lacking.

As always, it's a good looking movie... and we saw it in 3D, which always works really well with these stop motion movies.

I just wish it was more than the sum of it's parts.

yani's rating: 1 invisible goldfish out of 5