Frankenweenie On Tour

In 1984, Disney shelved the live action short Frankenweenie as too scary, and fired its young director, Tim Burton. 28 years later, studio and director are on the same page and the film, retooled as a big budget stop-motion feature, is coming to theaters in October. A new full-length trailer premiered last week.

Sparky, the Frankenstein dog, and his poodle Bride are back, along with new characters including a boy with a signature flattop, and Edgar, a creepy Weird-Oh-style hunchback. Voice actors include Winona Ryder, Martin Landau, Catherine O'Hara, and Christopher Lee does cameo as Dracula.

Also of interest is The Art of Frankenweenie, a very comprehensive exhibition of the film’s designs, puppets and sets that opened in Barcelona in June and will tour nine major cities throughout the year. Here’s a trailer for the exhibition.

Frankensteinian : Tim Burton's Blue Girl

She wears her stitches like permanent jewelry, body mods at once gruesome and delicate. Tim Burton’s Blue Girl appears in drawings, oil paintings and, here, in a polaroid print, Blue Girl with Skull, fleshed out by model Letitia Rogers in a costume by Colleen Atwood. The character would inspire Sally, the rag doll girl created by Dr. Finkelstein in The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993).

Frankenstein references are common in Tim Burton’s oeuvre. Early student films like The Island of Dr. Argor (1971) and Doctor of Doom (1979) already sample Frankensteinian themes. Frankenweenie (1984), a short made for Walt Disney, is a compact remake of James Whale’s Frankenstein (1931) with a boy and his dog standing in for Frankenstein and his Monster, a mini-golf windmill, and a poodle Bride. Frankenstein was the obvious template for Edward Scissorhands (1990), and there’s another important windmill scene in Sleepy Hollow (1999).

Beginning this Sunday, November 22, the Museum of Modern Art in New York is holding a comprehensive Tim Burton retrospective. Burton’s art is displayed in drawings, collages, paintings, sculpture and film.

The director pays homage, again, to Whale’s Frankenstein by including it the Lurid Beauty of Monsters film series that accompany the exhibit. And by the way, Frankenweenie is currently in development, to be remade as a feature film.

The MoMA exhibition page, and a wonderful preview site for the Tim Burton Retrospective.

An excellent blog, The Tim Burton Collective.