Frankenweenie Reviews
Top CriticTim Burton's most enjoyable movie in a long time.
Burton's best film since 1994's Ed Wood or even 1990's Edward Scissorhands.
This is a Tim Burton film with something to say. And that's a rare and precious thing.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/5
The stop-motion animation - a favorite tool of Burton's - is given loving attention, and the character design is full of terrific touches, such as the hulking flat-topped schoolmate who looks a bit like a certain man-made monster.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/4
The best thing about an animated monster movie with this much heart is: It's alive. In the best possible way.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
This 3-D, black-and-white "family" comedy is the year's most inventive, endearing animated feature.
Designed to appeal to both discriminating adults and older kids, the gorgeous, black-and-white stop-motion film is a fresh, clever and affectionate love letter to classic horror movies.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
The most Tim Burton-y of the director's films, and not just because it contains a vast catalog of references to his own movies - everything from "Edward Scissorhands'' to the underrated 1989 "Batman.''
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
"Frankenweenie" may just be a wacky horror cartoon, but it's an awfully good wacky horror cartoon. Frighteningly good, you might say.
Full Review
| Original Score: B+
It's a quintessential Burton film, but also more Disney than a lot of Disney films.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
A 3-D, black-and-white, stop-motion animated film, it's a one-man blow for cinematic biodiversity.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
The overall effect is great cinema, good fun, a visual feast for pie-eyed Burton fans - and a terrifically warped reminder of just how freaky a PG film can be.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/4
Some audiences might feel that "Frankenweenie" is creaky, but those on the same wavelength as Burton will gratefully declare it's alive.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
While "Frankenweenie" is fun, it is not nearly strange or original enough to join the undead, monstrous ranks of the classics it adores.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/5
There are so many horror auteurs Burton wants to thank that the film is absolutely bursting at the seams with knowing nods.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/5
Burton half succeeds in making this revamped Frankenweenie its own distinctive creature, pieced together from the essential bits of the 29-minute original. But he just doesn't know when to stop, and his overgrown creation gets the better of him.
Frankenweenie is the apotheosis of goth director Tim Burton's oeuvre: artistic yet sterile, incredibly meticulous and totally misbegotten.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
The story brims with self-parody, social satire, horror, nostalgia, wit and emotional insight, with Burton keeping all the plates spinning.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/4
Only Tim Burton could envision this Frankenstein-inspired tale, and it's a honey, a dark and dazzling spellbinder that scares up laughs and surprising emotion.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
"Frankenweenie" is a mere 87 minutes long, which turns out to be just the right length; there's not enough time for Burton to go off the rails as he does in so many of his films.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/4
Burton's extraordinary powers of imagination are in dazzling bloom, from the gorgeous stop-motion animation to the goofy, homemade horror movies the children direct.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/5
Missing, however, are the authentic feelings of morbidity and alienation that once made Burton an interesting filmmaker.
Even as the narrative becomes progressively more ghoulish and a Godzilla wannabe shows up, Frankenweenie never loses its heart.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
I was nagged by the feeling that the main motivating force behind the film is to convey that its makers really, really, really love old-school horror movies.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/5
High-concept and stylish, Frankenweenie is a playlist of films and characters from Burton's movie-loving childhood.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
The monster-movie component of "Frankenweenie" stomps all over the appeal of the original 30-minute version.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
Older kids, horror-movie buffs and Burton fans will likely enjoy this oddly gentle tale of a boy and his dog.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
This isn't one of Burton's best, but it has zealous energy.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
A beautifully crafted homage to classic horror films, a study of grief and a commentary on the mysteries of science and those who narrow-mindedly fear its advances.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
Fans of Tim Burton 1.0, rejoice: Frankenweenie hearkens back to the director's salad days and, in turn, to the old-school horror classics that inspired him in the first place.
The resulting homage to Frankenstein in particular and horror movies in general is exquisite, macabre mayhem and a kind of reanimation all its own.
Full Review
| Original Score: A-
It's all perfectly entertaining, but never really reaches the heights of hilarity, perhaps because everything about the plot is underdeveloped.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/5
Revisiting the past - his own, and that of the masters who came before him - seems to have brought this filmmaker's boyish enthusiasm back to life, as well.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
If dark and twisted is how you like your Burton movies, you're in luck.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
What still eludes Burton is the ability to deepen the superficial allure of his visions.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/5
Tight and brief, hitting all the marks you'd expect from an animated kid's film, and enlivened by Burton's visual style. The man should make more small movies like this one.
It's the best thing with Burton's name on it in the past five years.
Imaginative in a highly familiar and ultimately tedious way.
This beautifully designed canine-resurrection saga feels, somewhat fittingly, stitched together from stray narrative parts, but nonetheless evinces a level of discipline and artistic coherence missing from the director's recent live-action efforts.
