The latest film from legendary director Tim Burton, Dark Shadows , is out now in theaters, but that isn’t the last you’ll be seeing of Burton this year.
Burton’s next project is Frankenweenie , a film adaptation of the 1984 live-action short that shares the same name and, as it happens, the same director. Rather than going the live-action route as Burton did with the original, the director is instead going back to stop-motion animation.
Frankenweenie follows Victor, a young suburban boy who conducts a science experiment to bring his dead dog back to life. Victor is successful with the experiment, but Victor ends up getting a bit more than he bargained for.
In an interview with Entertainment Weekly ‘s ‘ Inside Movies ,’ Burton explains why he went with stop-motion animation for the Frankenweenie remake.
“It goes back to Ray Harryhausen,” Burton told EW. You look at his stuff, and you see the fur move! As a child, I recognized this artist. And there was something about stop-motion that felt more like a personal medium, especially because there were so few people doing it.
“Also, you go back to those kinds of stories, like Frankenstein or Pinocchio, about bringing an inanimate object to life. So here you have a process that does just that! It takes an inanimate object and you bring it to life. As hard of a medium as it is, there’s something so beautiful about that and the fact that it goes back to the beginning of film. The technique hasn’t changed — it’s still animating one frame at a time for 24 frames [to create a single second of film].”
On what Burton is able to do with stop-motion animation that he can’t do with real actors, the director said that it comes down to fitting his original vision.
“With my background in animation, I wanted to make the characters look more like my original drawings,” Burton explained. “There’s just more of a weird kind of energy in those drawings, and there are certain acting things that you can’t do with a real dog, you know? We wanted real dog emotions, and it’s a little easier to try to get that in animation.”
Are you interested in seeing Frankenweenie ? What about Dark Shadows ?