Frankenweenie

Directed by Tim Burton

(PG)

***

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Director Tim Burton’s latest is “the year’s most inventive, endearing animated feature,” said Richard Corliss in Time. Every family Burton puts on screen represents “a dialectic between the weird and the normal,” and here he’s given us a loving household where the precocious only son, Victor, has secretly managed to reanimate his dead dog using electric shocks. Made in stop-action animation, this is a horror spoof created by and for the “strange kids” in every school who are destined to become Burton-like visionaries. The story steals too many of its twists from horror films of the past, said Betsy Sharkey in the Los Angeles Times. But the black-and-white visuals are stunning, and the characters—including a Vincent Price–like science teacher (voiced by Martin Landau) and the schoolmates who want in on Victor’s sorcery—prove utterly winning. Just don’t put Frankenweenie on a level with the horror classics it pays homage to, said A.O. Scott in The New York Times. Those sometimes-campy films “touched deep anxieties.” This movie, in the end, is merely “a tissue of safe pop-culture allusions.”