Paranorman and Frankenweenie
Oct. 11th, 2012 09:02 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tealinHey guess who's on vacation? That crazy lady who goes on and on about things! I wonder what she will do with all this spare time ... Wander amongst some trees? Go stargazing? Savour the fresh air and wilderness she can't get at home? No!* She has written two excessively long movie reviews, one of which is probably too late to be of use to anyone!
PARANORMAN
I have to admit I went into Paranorman with a handicap: I have read and enjoyed Terry Pratchett's Johnny and the Dead, which is a book about a thirteen-year-old boy who can talk with the deceased. I knew this was going to be a handicap when I saw the first trailer, so I tried really hard to put Johnny and the Dead from my mind, and to watch Paranorman on its own terms. For the most part I think this was successful, because they turned out to be rather different stories, accomplishing different things with the premise, so I'm not going to judge Paranorman for not being Johnny and the Dead. But that doesn't necessarily make it better. It wasn't bad! I'm not saying it was bad. It just could have been better.
Norman is an adolescent oddball who has the unique ability to see and speak with the people who have passed on from his quaint little New England town. He has the usual teen-protagonist problems of being bullied and misunderstood, and of course talking with the air and being generally weird don't help. His sixth sense starts going a little nuts and he has visions of the ancient history of his town, whose Puritan founders executed a witch, setting up their descendents for a profitable tourist draw, and the promise of a curse should the proper protocol for keeping the spirit of the witch at peace ever not be kept. Well, you wouldn't have a movie if everything went according to plan, so before long the town founders are stalking the streets as zombies and the witch's malevolent spirit is doing pretty impressive things with the sky, and of course it's all down to Norman to sort it out because he's the only one who can talk to either of them.
This was the studio that brought us Coraline, so I was expecting high production values and imaginative, confident, independent art direction – and it didn't disappoint. There's some really good animation in there as well, and their devotion to craftsmanship is worn on their sleeve. I particularly liked the production design for giving the familiar world a recognizable but wonky charm. The character design was a bit hit-and-miss – there is such a thing as too pushed (though this is coming from someone who struggles to push anything, so your mileage may vary) – and while the leads are appealing, sometimes the secondary and tertiary characters are a little too grotesque, or look like they could have had a couple more draughts to find the appeal. I can't knock them too badly, though, because at least they had the confidence to go out on a limb.
Visuals are really the main thing going for the film, for me at least. It had some good ideas and some genuinely excellent sequences, but I kept feeling like they could have made a lot more out of what they had. The first half is really, really slow: they take as long as possible with their exposition when they could accomplish multiple things at once, or at least have more than one thing established per sequence. It might not have been so tedious if it had simply had more energy ... I don't know what was at fault, but it might have been as simple as the editing. It would be interesting to see if more zip could be brought to it just with a recut. It's not that I have a low tolerance for movies that take their time – anyone I've forced to watch Copenhagen or Wild Life can tell you I have more patience than the average bear – but slow storytelling makes use of its time for atmosphere or emotion, not just for slowness' sake, and you have to have some texture to the pacing, not a uniform lethargy. The movie doesn't really find itself until a significant flashback sequence halfway through, but thankfully it picks up after that. If they'd streamlined the exposition, they could have gotten to the meat of the story sooner, and spent more time exploring some of the ideas they touch on but don't really acknowledge, or which are just at their fingertips but never touched.
Which gets me to the second part of this 'review' ...
While I was willing and, for the most part, capable of putting aside Johnny and the Dead, I couldn't help thinking that Paranorman would benefit significantly from the mind of the mighty Sir Pratchett, who would take it from an adequate little Halloweeny story into something with greater meaning. Johnny and the Dead is about respecting where you come from, but also moving on, and to some extent grappling with the idea of death and taking the teeth out of the scariness of the 'undead' – after all, they're just us. Paranorman's intended story doesn't really go to these places, nor should it, necessarily, but it has a hard time figuring out what it is about, when a Pratchett book has that as its cornerstone. So for the sake of greater understanding of storytelling (because it's too late to do anything to fix Paranorman) and with Spoiler Alert Level raised to Orange, let's play a little game:
What Would Terry Pratchett Do?
The main issue, I think, as I discussed* above, is that Paranorman needs to decide what it is about; once it's nailed that down, the rest of the story can be pruned and trained around it. As I was watching the film, I made a list of themes which seemed to be vying for centrality. Is it about:
- duty?
- fear?
- bullying?
- commenting on American culture?
- kids vs grownups?
- the value of having friends?
Pick one (and a couple auxiliary ones for your subplots) and sculpt the story and characters in such a way as to bring it to the fore. Wandering about between them without committing to one long enough to mine anything from it just comes across as vague. And if it was supposed to be about any one of those things listed, it should have made a stronger point of it; don't bash the audience over the head, of course, but the theme should at least be detectable, even if it's a couple feet under the surface.
*or monoscussed, as the case may be, considering I'm talking to myself in the corner over here
One of the things that Terry Pratchett is very very good at doing is writing stories about 'special people' for 'special people' – quite a number of his books are about (or at least feature prominently) someone who is exceptionally smart, or is particularly gifted in some way. This is not unusual in itself, as a large portion of literature (especially YA fantasy) is about exceptional people, but most of it tells such readers that they are exceptional and should expect to be treated as such. The difference with Terry Pratchett is that his 'special' protagonists, in books from Equal Rites to I Shall Wear Midnight, learn that just because you are a special snowflake doesn't mean you have the right to treat other people like they don't matter – or in the words of Johnny to Kirsty in the Johnny Maxwell series, "Just because you're a hammer doesn't mean you have to treat everyone else like a nail." Other people may be boring, or dumb, or mean to you, but that doesn't mean they aren't people or that they don't have feelings, and they have just as much right to decency and respect as you do. This is an approach that Paranorman could have benefited from, and would have really separated it from the pack. I can understand where the filmmakers are coming from: most artists (writers, musicians, actors etc being included in that group), have always been aware that they are different from other people and have abilities that others don't understand. Usually they've been ostracised to some degree growing up, and harbour a certain amount of resentment towards the hoi polloi. Telling a story that reaches out to kids like them, telling them they're special and valuable, and that the bullies and clueless parents and careless peers are wrong, brings both personal vindication and a feeling that you're coming as close as possible to helping your younger self. This is not a bad thing, and it's important that people who have been through such experiences in childhood reach out to people who are going through the same thing now, to let them know they're not alone and that, not to put too fine a point on it, It Gets Better. But there needs to be some nuance brought to the conversation, otherwise you're only cementing the dichotomy between Us and Them, and making the problem worse by amplifying resentment on either side.
Addressing this is entirely within Paranorman's scope, and within the story they established is the perfect opportunity to resolve this dichotomy. Both Norman and Abigail are "special people," and the chasm of misunderstanding between Abigail and her "normal people" is responsible for the conflict that drives the story. The way it goes in the movie is this: when Norman fails to enact the temporary solution to the "witch's curse," by reading her the story to keep her asleep, he has to address her directly. He talks her out of her wrath by, on one hand, telling her she has become the bully, and on the other, bringing to the surface of her memory the recollection of being loved and finding her 'happy place,' which puts her to sleep at least as well as the bedtime story would have done.
The way this sequence was boarded and art directed made it one of the best in the movie. As such it's easy to be distracted from its faults by the shiny, but there were two things that kept bothering me about it. First, what Norman was communicating to Abigail didn't really address the underlying concepts in a way that hit home for the audience – this would have been helped if the underlying concepts of the movie had been decided upon and the groundwork laid from the beginning, rendering the audience familiar with the issues in question and ideas surrounding them, so the climactic conversation could be the clincher. Second, Norman is only really putting her to sleep again, albeit in a more personal and probably more effective way than has been done previously ... if you want a permanent solution to the problem, you need reconciliation. The zombie of the judge who ordered her execution was RIGHT THERE. It would have been so easy to get him into the arena and, with Norman as mediator, he could have apologised to her for being awful, and she – this is the extra super important part in regards to elevating the story and bringing home an important lesson – she could exhibit a tiny bit of empathy, and accept the apology. This would not make what they did okay, because if it was okay the judge wouldn't have had to apologise, but it's the only way to bring the thing to a real conclusion: They are all dead, they have no incentive to hang on to this grudge forever and every incentive to move on, so why not? And wouldn't it say something powerful to everyone watching, whose lives are contorted by their own bloodyminded resentments, about how moving on makes everything better? Norman would be the ideal mediator, because in this version of the story, he would still be an oddball, but in the course of his adventure with the bunch of teenagers in the van, he would have come to see them as people instead of adversaries. They'd have their own mental spaces, feelings, perspectives, and unexpected quirks, because in this version the secondary characters would be more dimensional people and not just stock types; as Norman spent time with them and came to understand them, they would also understand him, and there would be demonstrable proof that they worked better as a team.
Next time, maybe.
Verdict: A good enough movie, however much it may have fallen short of what it could have been – worth a watch if only for the art, which may sustain your interest until it hits its stride about halfway through. Then go read Johnny and the Dead for an example of doin' it rite.
FRANKENWEENIE
As with most movies I see, this one was screened at work, though because it was Disney we got to see it a few days before it opened rather than a month after. The producer even came to present it and do a Q&A afterwards! Exciting, right?
First, the facts: Frankenweenie is a black-and-white stop-motion animated film whose genre could, I suppose, be described as 'kiddie horror,' though it's not really scary (or creepy or spooky) at any point.* It's an expansion of a short live-action film Tim Burton made while he was at Disney in the 1980s. A little boy named Victor's only friend is his dog Sparky, but one day Sparky learns some lessons about road safety the hard way, leaving Victor bereft. Inspired by his science teacher, he sets about reanimating Sparky in classic rooftop-lab-and-lightning style. This works surprisingly without any major hitches, though when the success of the experiment is made known to the rest of the kids, and subsequent attempts are made with other deceased animals, none of them turn out quite as well.
*To be fair, there is one sequence involving the transformation of a cat which I found unexpectedly uncomfortable – I don't know if it was legitimately disturbing in itself or its unsettling nature was amplified by nothing else in the film having even tried to go in that direction.
I should preface my meta-rambling with some background information: I have been, for the most part, a Tim Burton fan, though I will concede that in the last ... ten ... years, his misses have been more frequent than his hits. I was absolutely nuts about Nightmare Before Christmas when it came out, and watched it – I kid you not – very nearly every day in Grade 7. I have also enjoyed a fair few old Hammer horror films, and some of the black-and-white Universal ones, so I appreciate the heritage and what Frankenweenie was going for. But I also remember how bored I was by Corpse Bride,* so my expectations were moderate to low even when they announced Frankenweenie; when I saw the trailers I was even less enthusiastic. And yet, despite all this ... it still managed to disappoint.
*I have the soundtrack and the art book and I even bought the DVD because I remembered how great the animation was, but when occasionally my sanity lapses and I think it can't be as dull as I'm remembering, and I put it in to watch, I can't even get through the opening song because so boring.
The main problem with it, I think, is that it's pretty dull. In most films you have a main plot and a few subplots that interweave and keep things moving forward, but this one only really has one. That's not necessarily a problem in itself, but the one plotline tells its tale just as slowly and deliberately as it would if it had subplots coming in to pick up the slack during the lulls. This results in taking an inordinately long time to convey one nugget of story information, with no simultaneous character development or worldbuilding to add some flavour ... then another chunk of time to advance one step in character without plot or background ... then time for background without plot or character ... It's as if they felt they had to explain everything to a very small child, but forgot the energy and visual comedy that small children find entertaining.
Better character development could have made the painstaking plot less noticeable – if you make your characters fun to spend time with, it doesn't matter as much how quickly the story advances because they can entertain you all by themselves. In a similar vein, if you have some really compelling ideas that you want to explore, and can work them into your story or characters in an interesting way, your plot can take a holiday and the movie will still be interesting. Unfortunately, Frankenweenie's characters ranged from 'stock' to 'cipher,' so that was no refuge. Partway through I thought they might be going for Ideas About Science, but it became clear the writer(s) didn't know as much about science as they thought they did, and their interesting unconventional take on variables didn't have much under the hood; even the movie lost interest in it shortly after I did.
That said, I was never sufficiently bored to consider leaving the theatre. Partly this is because I didn't want to miss the Q&A, but there was also a little bit of hope that the film would get more exciting as the climax approached, and a really surprising amount of appreciation for the black and white compositions. Honestly, the cinematography is the only thing, to my mind, that didn't feel like it was phoned in – I learned in the Q&A afterwards that the Director of Photography was a big fan of German Expressionist films, and it showed that he was really enjoying his work. Everything else was just ... competent. Much better than being incompetent, to be sure, but it would have been nice if some other aspect of the film could have been shiny while the story was being dull; even if they couldn't be genuinely spooky, there could have been some stellar animation, or exemplary voice acting, or imaginative storyboarding, or even some funny and/or witty dialogue. Regarding the latter, the most consistently funny thing was the Starey Girl, and that only because her face and voice were so constant and so often inappropriate for the scene; she became sort of a running gag just by existing.
The most telling thing, I think, is that unlike Paranorman, I was never tempted to figure out how to fix Frankenweenie. The simple explanation is that I just didn't care: I think perhaps the kernel of it is that there is a good movie in Paranorman somewhere; the good movie in Frankenweenie already exists – it's the short live-action film. If you can find the original film, watch that instead ... I think it may be a special feature on the DVD or Blu-Ray of a more recent Burton/Disney collaboration but I can't tell you which one.
Verdict: Not entertaining enough to be good, and not bad enough to be entertaining. Probably best consumed as a family night in, where you can get up for snacks, chat amongst yourselves, or check your email when things get slow.
*Actually yes; it has been lovely
I have to admit I went into Paranorman with a handicap: I have read and enjoyed Terry Pratchett's Johnny and the Dead, which is a book about a thirteen-year-old boy who can talk with the deceased. I knew this was going to be a handicap when I saw the first trailer, so I tried really hard to put Johnny and the Dead from my mind, and to watch Paranorman on its own terms. For the most part I think this was successful, because they turned out to be rather different stories, accomplishing different things with the premise, so I'm not going to judge Paranorman for not being Johnny and the Dead. But that doesn't necessarily make it better. It wasn't bad! I'm not saying it was bad. It just could have been better.
Norman is an adolescent oddball who has the unique ability to see and speak with the people who have passed on from his quaint little New England town. He has the usual teen-protagonist problems of being bullied and misunderstood, and of course talking with the air and being generally weird don't help. His sixth sense starts going a little nuts and he has visions of the ancient history of his town, whose Puritan founders executed a witch, setting up their descendents for a profitable tourist draw, and the promise of a curse should the proper protocol for keeping the spirit of the witch at peace ever not be kept. Well, you wouldn't have a movie if everything went according to plan, so before long the town founders are stalking the streets as zombies and the witch's malevolent spirit is doing pretty impressive things with the sky, and of course it's all down to Norman to sort it out because he's the only one who can talk to either of them.
This was the studio that brought us Coraline, so I was expecting high production values and imaginative, confident, independent art direction – and it didn't disappoint. There's some really good animation in there as well, and their devotion to craftsmanship is worn on their sleeve. I particularly liked the production design for giving the familiar world a recognizable but wonky charm. The character design was a bit hit-and-miss – there is such a thing as too pushed (though this is coming from someone who struggles to push anything, so your mileage may vary) – and while the leads are appealing, sometimes the secondary and tertiary characters are a little too grotesque, or look like they could have had a couple more draughts to find the appeal. I can't knock them too badly, though, because at least they had the confidence to go out on a limb.
Visuals are really the main thing going for the film, for me at least. It had some good ideas and some genuinely excellent sequences, but I kept feeling like they could have made a lot more out of what they had. The first half is really, really slow: they take as long as possible with their exposition when they could accomplish multiple things at once, or at least have more than one thing established per sequence. It might not have been so tedious if it had simply had more energy ... I don't know what was at fault, but it might have been as simple as the editing. It would be interesting to see if more zip could be brought to it just with a recut. It's not that I have a low tolerance for movies that take their time – anyone I've forced to watch Copenhagen or Wild Life can tell you I have more patience than the average bear – but slow storytelling makes use of its time for atmosphere or emotion, not just for slowness' sake, and you have to have some texture to the pacing, not a uniform lethargy. The movie doesn't really find itself until a significant flashback sequence halfway through, but thankfully it picks up after that. If they'd streamlined the exposition, they could have gotten to the meat of the story sooner, and spent more time exploring some of the ideas they touch on but don't really acknowledge, or which are just at their fingertips but never touched.
Which gets me to the second part of this 'review' ...
While I was willing and, for the most part, capable of putting aside Johnny and the Dead, I couldn't help thinking that Paranorman would benefit significantly from the mind of the mighty Sir Pratchett, who would take it from an adequate little Halloweeny story into something with greater meaning. Johnny and the Dead is about respecting where you come from, but also moving on, and to some extent grappling with the idea of death and taking the teeth out of the scariness of the 'undead' – after all, they're just us. Paranorman's intended story doesn't really go to these places, nor should it, necessarily, but it has a hard time figuring out what it is about, when a Pratchett book has that as its cornerstone. So for the sake of greater understanding of storytelling (because it's too late to do anything to fix Paranorman) and with Spoiler Alert Level raised to Orange, let's play a little game:
What Would Terry Pratchett Do?
The main issue, I think, as I discussed* above, is that Paranorman needs to decide what it is about; once it's nailed that down, the rest of the story can be pruned and trained around it. As I was watching the film, I made a list of themes which seemed to be vying for centrality. Is it about:
- duty?
- fear?
- bullying?
- commenting on American culture?
- kids vs grownups?
- the value of having friends?
Pick one (and a couple auxiliary ones for your subplots) and sculpt the story and characters in such a way as to bring it to the fore. Wandering about between them without committing to one long enough to mine anything from it just comes across as vague. And if it was supposed to be about any one of those things listed, it should have made a stronger point of it; don't bash the audience over the head, of course, but the theme should at least be detectable, even if it's a couple feet under the surface.
*or monoscussed, as the case may be, considering I'm talking to myself in the corner over here
One of the things that Terry Pratchett is very very good at doing is writing stories about 'special people' for 'special people' – quite a number of his books are about (or at least feature prominently) someone who is exceptionally smart, or is particularly gifted in some way. This is not unusual in itself, as a large portion of literature (especially YA fantasy) is about exceptional people, but most of it tells such readers that they are exceptional and should expect to be treated as such. The difference with Terry Pratchett is that his 'special' protagonists, in books from Equal Rites to I Shall Wear Midnight, learn that just because you are a special snowflake doesn't mean you have the right to treat other people like they don't matter – or in the words of Johnny to Kirsty in the Johnny Maxwell series, "Just because you're a hammer doesn't mean you have to treat everyone else like a nail." Other people may be boring, or dumb, or mean to you, but that doesn't mean they aren't people or that they don't have feelings, and they have just as much right to decency and respect as you do. This is an approach that Paranorman could have benefited from, and would have really separated it from the pack. I can understand where the filmmakers are coming from: most artists (writers, musicians, actors etc being included in that group), have always been aware that they are different from other people and have abilities that others don't understand. Usually they've been ostracised to some degree growing up, and harbour a certain amount of resentment towards the hoi polloi. Telling a story that reaches out to kids like them, telling them they're special and valuable, and that the bullies and clueless parents and careless peers are wrong, brings both personal vindication and a feeling that you're coming as close as possible to helping your younger self. This is not a bad thing, and it's important that people who have been through such experiences in childhood reach out to people who are going through the same thing now, to let them know they're not alone and that, not to put too fine a point on it, It Gets Better. But there needs to be some nuance brought to the conversation, otherwise you're only cementing the dichotomy between Us and Them, and making the problem worse by amplifying resentment on either side.
Addressing this is entirely within Paranorman's scope, and within the story they established is the perfect opportunity to resolve this dichotomy. Both Norman and Abigail are "special people," and the chasm of misunderstanding between Abigail and her "normal people" is responsible for the conflict that drives the story. The way it goes in the movie is this: when Norman fails to enact the temporary solution to the "witch's curse," by reading her the story to keep her asleep, he has to address her directly. He talks her out of her wrath by, on one hand, telling her she has become the bully, and on the other, bringing to the surface of her memory the recollection of being loved and finding her 'happy place,' which puts her to sleep at least as well as the bedtime story would have done.
The way this sequence was boarded and art directed made it one of the best in the movie. As such it's easy to be distracted from its faults by the shiny, but there were two things that kept bothering me about it. First, what Norman was communicating to Abigail didn't really address the underlying concepts in a way that hit home for the audience – this would have been helped if the underlying concepts of the movie had been decided upon and the groundwork laid from the beginning, rendering the audience familiar with the issues in question and ideas surrounding them, so the climactic conversation could be the clincher. Second, Norman is only really putting her to sleep again, albeit in a more personal and probably more effective way than has been done previously ... if you want a permanent solution to the problem, you need reconciliation. The zombie of the judge who ordered her execution was RIGHT THERE. It would have been so easy to get him into the arena and, with Norman as mediator, he could have apologised to her for being awful, and she – this is the extra super important part in regards to elevating the story and bringing home an important lesson – she could exhibit a tiny bit of empathy, and accept the apology. This would not make what they did okay, because if it was okay the judge wouldn't have had to apologise, but it's the only way to bring the thing to a real conclusion: They are all dead, they have no incentive to hang on to this grudge forever and every incentive to move on, so why not? And wouldn't it say something powerful to everyone watching, whose lives are contorted by their own bloodyminded resentments, about how moving on makes everything better? Norman would be the ideal mediator, because in this version of the story, he would still be an oddball, but in the course of his adventure with the bunch of teenagers in the van, he would have come to see them as people instead of adversaries. They'd have their own mental spaces, feelings, perspectives, and unexpected quirks, because in this version the secondary characters would be more dimensional people and not just stock types; as Norman spent time with them and came to understand them, they would also understand him, and there would be demonstrable proof that they worked better as a team.
Next time, maybe.
Verdict: A good enough movie, however much it may have fallen short of what it could have been – worth a watch if only for the art, which may sustain your interest until it hits its stride about halfway through. Then go read Johnny and the Dead for an example of doin' it rite.
As with most movies I see, this one was screened at work, though because it was Disney we got to see it a few days before it opened rather than a month after. The producer even came to present it and do a Q&A afterwards! Exciting, right?
First, the facts: Frankenweenie is a black-and-white stop-motion animated film whose genre could, I suppose, be described as 'kiddie horror,' though it's not really scary (or creepy or spooky) at any point.* It's an expansion of a short live-action film Tim Burton made while he was at Disney in the 1980s. A little boy named Victor's only friend is his dog Sparky, but one day Sparky learns some lessons about road safety the hard way, leaving Victor bereft. Inspired by his science teacher, he sets about reanimating Sparky in classic rooftop-lab-and-lightning style. This works surprisingly without any major hitches, though when the success of the experiment is made known to the rest of the kids, and subsequent attempts are made with other deceased animals, none of them turn out quite as well.
*To be fair, there is one sequence involving the transformation of a cat which I found unexpectedly uncomfortable – I don't know if it was legitimately disturbing in itself or its unsettling nature was amplified by nothing else in the film having even tried to go in that direction.
I should preface my meta-rambling with some background information: I have been, for the most part, a Tim Burton fan, though I will concede that in the last ... ten ... years, his misses have been more frequent than his hits. I was absolutely nuts about Nightmare Before Christmas when it came out, and watched it – I kid you not – very nearly every day in Grade 7. I have also enjoyed a fair few old Hammer horror films, and some of the black-and-white Universal ones, so I appreciate the heritage and what Frankenweenie was going for. But I also remember how bored I was by Corpse Bride,* so my expectations were moderate to low even when they announced Frankenweenie; when I saw the trailers I was even less enthusiastic. And yet, despite all this ... it still managed to disappoint.
*I have the soundtrack and the art book and I even bought the DVD because I remembered how great the animation was, but when occasionally my sanity lapses and I think it can't be as dull as I'm remembering, and I put it in to watch, I can't even get through the opening song because so boring.
The main problem with it, I think, is that it's pretty dull. In most films you have a main plot and a few subplots that interweave and keep things moving forward, but this one only really has one. That's not necessarily a problem in itself, but the one plotline tells its tale just as slowly and deliberately as it would if it had subplots coming in to pick up the slack during the lulls. This results in taking an inordinately long time to convey one nugget of story information, with no simultaneous character development or worldbuilding to add some flavour ... then another chunk of time to advance one step in character without plot or background ... then time for background without plot or character ... It's as if they felt they had to explain everything to a very small child, but forgot the energy and visual comedy that small children find entertaining.
Better character development could have made the painstaking plot less noticeable – if you make your characters fun to spend time with, it doesn't matter as much how quickly the story advances because they can entertain you all by themselves. In a similar vein, if you have some really compelling ideas that you want to explore, and can work them into your story or characters in an interesting way, your plot can take a holiday and the movie will still be interesting. Unfortunately, Frankenweenie's characters ranged from 'stock' to 'cipher,' so that was no refuge. Partway through I thought they might be going for Ideas About Science, but it became clear the writer(s) didn't know as much about science as they thought they did, and their interesting unconventional take on variables didn't have much under the hood; even the movie lost interest in it shortly after I did.
That said, I was never sufficiently bored to consider leaving the theatre. Partly this is because I didn't want to miss the Q&A, but there was also a little bit of hope that the film would get more exciting as the climax approached, and a really surprising amount of appreciation for the black and white compositions. Honestly, the cinematography is the only thing, to my mind, that didn't feel like it was phoned in – I learned in the Q&A afterwards that the Director of Photography was a big fan of German Expressionist films, and it showed that he was really enjoying his work. Everything else was just ... competent. Much better than being incompetent, to be sure, but it would have been nice if some other aspect of the film could have been shiny while the story was being dull; even if they couldn't be genuinely spooky, there could have been some stellar animation, or exemplary voice acting, or imaginative storyboarding, or even some funny and/or witty dialogue. Regarding the latter, the most consistently funny thing was the Starey Girl, and that only because her face and voice were so constant and so often inappropriate for the scene; she became sort of a running gag just by existing.
The most telling thing, I think, is that unlike Paranorman, I was never tempted to figure out how to fix Frankenweenie. The simple explanation is that I just didn't care: I think perhaps the kernel of it is that there is a good movie in Paranorman somewhere; the good movie in Frankenweenie already exists – it's the short live-action film. If you can find the original film, watch that instead ... I think it may be a special feature on the DVD or Blu-Ray of a more recent Burton/Disney collaboration but I can't tell you which one.
Verdict: Not entertaining enough to be good, and not bad enough to be entertaining. Probably best consumed as a family night in, where you can get up for snacks, chat amongst yourselves, or check your email when things get slow.
*Actually yes; it has been lovely
