Before Tim Burton hit it big with Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure, he worked at Disney in the animation department where (among other things) he designed this nightmare-inducing bear for The Fox and the Hound:
During this time, Burton also created a charming but odd short film called Frankenweenie, which centered on a young boy named Victor, who decides to bring his beloved dog back from the dead with the help of science! So this pint-sized Dr. Frankenstein creates this slobbering monstrosity:
To Burton’s surprise, Disney found the finished result too strange to release, and so Frankenweenie was buried indefinitely. But now, Burton has given this dead dog new life, resurrecting Frankenweenie as a full-length black-and-white animated feature, and EW has the first look at Vincent in his laboratory and his beloved Sparky before the accident:
“He doesn’t have any stitches yet,” Burton laughs. “That’s only a short part of the film. Don’t get too used to that look.”
Re-imagined in the stop-motion medium that served Burton well in The Nightmare Before Christmas, this new and improved Frankenweenie intends to lure in audiences of all ages with a simple but sweet tale of a boy and his dog, with a decidedly demented twist moviegoers have come to expect from Burton. Former Burton collaborators Winona Ryder (Beetlejuice and Edward Scissorhands), Catherine O’Hara (Beetlejuice), Martin Landau (Ed Wood), and Martin Short (Mars Attacks) will lend their voices to Frankenweenie, which hits theaters October 5, 2012.
In the mean time, check out the original, which stars Daniel Stern and Shelley Duvall, in full below:
Are you looking forward to the rise of Frankenweenie?