Victror is a child science-wizz and amatur film-maker; when his best freind, his dog Sparky, is run over, Victor digs him up, and brings him back to life.
With the school science fair coming up, it isn't long before the other kids are trying to reanimate animals using Victor's technology... Unfortunately, Sparky's return is a bit of a fluke, and the other animals all come back as monsters.
When I heard that Tim Burton was re-making his excellent 1984 live-action short as a stop motion feature length movie, I was a little concerned; The stop motion seemed unnecessary as it worked brilliantly in live-action, and I was worried that expanding the movie to 3 times its original length would result in a lot of padding.
After watching the movie, I completely understand the decision to go with an animated version (more on the animation later), it became very quickly apparent that the padding concern was justified.
As well as as lot of padding in the first act (Vincent's dad talks him into playing baseball, for instance), the last act of the movie seems to be tacked in from another movie, as some of Vincent's classmates try to recreate his experiment, causing the town to be overrun with monsters, ranging from an army of 2' high seamonkeys (based on the humanoid sea monkeys from the packaging) to a godzilla-sized tortoise... at least by that point the decision to animate makes sense!
Speaking of the animation; superb. so good infact, that you'd be forgiven for thinking it was CGed. I'm not sure the painstaking art of stop-motion makes a lot of sense from a financial standpoint, especially if you do it so well that it no longer loods stop-motioned) but you have to admire the skill!
The character designs were mostly good, but variable; There's a kid in Vincent's class at school who looks like a cartoon Igor (I get that this is deliberate but he looks out of place, stylistically), and an Asian kid, complete with potentially offensive faux-oriental 'axerent' (no pints for guessing who winds up making the godzilla turtle). The highlight though is Mr. Rzykruski, Victors science teacher, who has an uncanny resemblance to Vincent Price.
Rzykruski has a great scene, by the way, in which the parents of the town have gathered to have him sacked for teaching their kids "things [the parents] have never even heard of", he responds by telling the parents that they are ignorant, and scared of science because they have small minds. Words like "godly" and "intelligent design" are never used, but the allegory should be clear to the adults in the audience (and he screws up his speech amusingly enough to keep kids and adults alike happy).
Bear in mind that I am a fan of the original, and this will taint my opinion of this version. But I found it fell flat, partly through some unnecessary, and charm stripping, changes (the windmill is now a full sized, real, windmill) but mostly because the padding is obvious and the monster-plot out of place.
That said, it was an okay film, and I'm sure its target audience will love it.
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