FRANKENWEENIE (Tim Burton) directed by Tim Burton, written by John August from an original screenplay by Leonard Ripps and Burton, with the voices of Charlie Tahan, Catherine O’Hara, Martin Short and Winona Ryder. A Walt Disney Pictures release. 87 minutes. Opens Friday (October 5). For venues and times, see listings.
Frankenweenie is a very personal project for Tim Burton. It’s a 3D stop-motion remake of his 1984 short about a little boy named Victor Frankenstein who uses science to bring his beloved dog Sparky back to life after he’s hit by a car.
The voice cast reads like a list of Burton’s favourite people: Winona Ryder, with whom he made Beetlejuice and Edward Scissorhands Martin Landau, who won an Oscar for Ed Wood, and SCTV veterans Catherine O’Hara and Martin Short, who played key roles in Beetlejuice and Mars Attacks! respectively.
O’Hara and Short play three parts apiece in Frankenweenie, including Victor’s mother and father – a relationship that’s almost as important to the story as Victor and Sparky’s.
“I think he wanted a very real intimacy for the parents,” says Short, sitting next to O’Hara in a suite at the Thompson Hotel, “to capitalize on our long history as actors and friends.”
“As a married couple,” O’Hara interjects with a chuckle.
“As a married couple with that horrible divorce we went through,” Short says, going with the gag. (Once an improviser, always an improviser.)
“But I think it was beneficial. Because with the other characters, he would kind of say, ‘Okay, what do you want to do? What do you think?’ With this he had a very specific idea. Even when he said, ‘I want it to sound like you guys,’ he meant ‘Don’t put any spin on it.'”
The pair’s other characters – a gruff mayor and a baseball coach for Short, a gym teacher and a strange classmate of Victor’s for O’Hara – were invitations to play around in Burton’s world. But while both veterans regularly took on multiple roles in their SCTV days, they found themselves a little apprehensive about doing it as voice actors.
“You don’t even have makeup and fat suits to distract you,” O’Hara laughs.
“Exactly,” Short agrees. “We talked about it with each other: ‘Why are we playing three [roles]? It’s great, but why are we playing three?’ And we were afraid if we brought it up with Tim, he’d say, ‘Oh, yeah, why are you playing three?’ So we didn’t.”
“With all the hair and makeup in the world,” adds O’Hara, “I don’t know if we could look as different from ourselves as these characters do.”
In Burton, O’Hara and Short had a director who trusted his actors so much that he barely offered them any direction at all.
“You just go in there and you’re laughin’ about life,” O’Hara says of her trips to the recording studio. “‘How’s so and so?’ And then it’s ‘Okay, look at the drawings. So this character….’ Not even telling us their story within the movie, not ‘Here’s what I was thinking’ – none of that. It’s so open and innocent. He just wants to see what you have. And then he guides you, of course.”
“I went in there for a session once and he just showed me a video of Helena with one of his kids,” Short says.
“Really?” O’Hara laughs.
“The interesting thing about Tim Burton,” Short tells me, “is how genuine and sweet and funny and loose and endearing he is. And I think he really captures that part of his own soul in [the characters of] Victor and the dog.”
“Never at any point did he even say, ‘Have you seen the short film?'” O’Hara says. “He doesn’t talk about himself or his process at all.”
Interview Clips
Martin Short and Catherine O’Hara on whether Frankenweenie is suitable for kids (and how amazing stop-motion is):
Martin Short and Catherine O’Hara on how the movie handles the truly sad elements of its story [potential spoilers, potential oversharing]:
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