Film reviews: Frankenweenie | Madagascar 3 | Ginger and Rosa

ONE of his periodic forays into stop-motion filmmaking, Tim Burton’s latest finds him returning to his first live-action short film

Frankenweenie (PG)

Directed by: Tim Burton

Voices: Winona Ryder, Catherine O’Hara, Martin Short, Martin Landau, Charlie Tahan

* * * *

He re-animates, if you will, its delightfully daffy suburban spin on Frankenstein (young boy uses mad science to bring his beloved dog back to life after a tragic accident) and turning it into a gorgeously rendered black-and-white family film. The good news is that in doing so, the director has also made his most satisfying movie for some time. Shorn of the need to transform someone else’s source material into something that’s identifiably his, it’s as if his own febrile imagination has been given a jolt similar to the one that brings his ten-year-old hero’s dog back to life. That hero is Victor Frankenstein (Charlie Tahan), a lonely kid in the (fictional) American town of New Holland who spends most of his spare time in his attic bedroom editing together the 8mm backyard blockbusters he makes with his pet pooch Sparky. Don’t worry though, this isn’t a cue for another reverential film celebrating the “magic of movies”. Even though it begins with the now overly familiar sight of scratchy film footage – albeit rendered in animation form – and is full of allusions to classic horror movies (not to mention the director’s own back-catalogue) Burton keeps such things mostly in check, using them as minor foreshadowing for some of the monster movie shenanigans he has up his sleeve. Mostly he’s interested in wringing emotion out of the endearingly macabre relationship that Victor – who is really more of a science nerd than a film one – has with the Sparky, after a spot of bad advice from Victor’s clueless parents (voiced by Catherine O’Hara and Martin Short) leads to Sparky’s tragic early demise. Inspired by his eccentric science teacher Mr Rsykrusk (played by Martin Landau) – the heartbroken Victor develops a way to bring Sparky back from the dead, which inevitably leads to a heap of trouble as the neighbourhood kids – and eventually the town’s adult population – realise what he’s done. What’s particularly charming here – aside from the spot-on way the film captures the special relationship between a child and their pet – is that Burton doesn’t treat this as cautionary tale of scientific hubris, but of parental hubris: everything that happens does so because Victor’s well-meaning but clueless parents try to mould him into their idea of what a normal child should be instead of trying to understand who he is.

Madagascar 3: Europe’s Most Wanted (PG)

Directed by: Eric Darnell, Conrad Vernon, Tom McGrath

Voices: Ben Stiller, Chris Rock, David Schwimmer, Jada Pinkett-Smith, Sacha Baron Cohen, Martin Short, Bryan cranston

* * *

THIRD time is almost a charm in this latest instalment of the hugely successful, but thus far largely uninspired, CG animated series about a gang of escaped New York City zoo animals. After a sequel that disappointed even the first film’s biggest fans, this new one ups the ante considerably by embracing the value of frantically paced comic action over everything else, something that happily brings to mind the old Looney Tunes cartoons and certainly helps elevate it above similarly successful films (albeit bafflingly so) such as the Ice Age movies. Picking up where the last film left off, the old gang of Alex the Lion (Ben Stiller), Marty the Zebra (Chris Rock), Melman the Giraffe (David Schwimmer) and Gloria the Hippo (Jada Pinkett-Smith) have grown tired of life in Africa and just want to return home to the zoo where their antics used to be appreciated by an adoring and easy-to-please public. Mercifully that doesn’t become this film’s guiding creative principle; instead what follows is a fairly ripsnorting adventure as Alex and Co bounce from one country-specific set-piece to another, creating havoc along the way until the main thrust of the plot kicks in. That happens when the gang join a struggling circus in order to escape the clutches of a deranged French animal control cop (Frances McDormand) whose obsession with tracking them down borders on the pathological. The circus conceit is, of course, really just an excuse to introduce a slew of new characters and score easy laughs, but it mostly works, with Martin Short (also pulling vocal duties in Frankenweenie) the most endearing as a dopey Italian sea lion and Breaking Bad’s Bryan Cranston on amusingly craggy form as Vitaly, a Siberian tiger whose suspicions about the new stowaways mask his own fear of performing the remarkable acrobatics for which he was once known. The script – which is co-credited to Squid and the Whale writer/director Noah Baumbach (presumably brought on because of the wondrous work he did on Wes Anderson’s Fantastic Mr Fox adaptation) – keeps the moralising to a minimum and keeps the pace at a frantic clip, with the gag rate complemented by some surprisingly far-out and crazy visuals that overwhelm – in a good way – the wafer-thin story.

Ginger and Rosa (12A)

Directed by: Sally Potter

Starring: Elle Fanning, Alice Englert, Christina Hendricks, Oliver Platt, Alessandro Nivola

* *

GIVEN that we’re in the midst of the 50th anniversary of the Cuban missile crisis, this movie about two best friends coming-of-age in London at a time when the world was on the brink of mutually assured destruction is curiously flat. Written and directed by Sally Potter (Orlando), it’s a collection of hoary old artistic clichés performed by a thesp-heavy cast – among them Annette Benning, Alessandro Nivola, Oliver Platt and Christina Hendricks – who talk in ways that bear little relation to how people actually interact. Some of that is simply down to accents.

Following older sister Dakota’s recent turn in the woeful Now is Good, Elle Fanning’s attempt to master the Gwyneth Paltrow Brit Standard AccentTM seems to have inhibited her ability to act convincingly (the same goes for Hendricks and Nivola). As the titular Ginger, a young girl born on the day the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, Fanning sounds like she’s auditioning for a Jane Austen adaptation, not a girl whose increasing awareness of her own mortality is fuelling her political and artistic awakening.

Her relationship with her birthday-sharing best friend Rosa (Alice Englert), is barely any more convincing, with a wholly predictable betrayal leading to their bond being split, atom-like, with calamitous results.