Oh, Shih Tzu.
Sparky is probably the ugliest dog you’ll ever lay eyes on. At the Westminster Dog Show, he’d take home a blue ribbon in the coveted Most Likely to Make Children Throw Up category.
He’s covered in scars, and his head is unevenly stitched on with thick black thread. His sewn-on tail occasionally falls off when it wags. Two metal bolts haphazardly stick out of his neck.
In Tim Burton’s Gothic world, the charm lies in how wonderfully grotesque everything is. His characters have a singular, dark look, whether it’s Edward Scissorhands with his buckle-heavy leather get-up, pale skin and Robert Smith tangle of hair, or the Corpse Bride, with her skeletal arm, blueish pallor and Victorian fashion sense.
Not surprisingly, Burton and his creepy aesthetic were once outside the norm. But now, nearly 30 years after his first movie, he’s become the kind of Hollywood force that spawns imitators and might even be — dare we say — mainstream.
When it comes to Halloween, Burton is the go-to guy.
In the 1970s and ’80s, a horror film generally meant a killer carving up teenagers with an axe. Burton gave us something else: family-friendly films whose scares were driven by unique design and atmosphere. This Friday, Burton releases his latest, “Frankenweenie,” a feature-length redo of his 1984 short film about a young boy who brings his dead dog back to life, a la Dr. Frankenstein.
His first go-round on the film didn’t exactly work out as he’d planned. In fact, he was fired by Disney because of it. “Yeah, kind of, basically,” Burton tells The Post. “Let’s put it this way: They weren’t pleading with me to stay.”
Back in the early 1980s, Burton was an art-school graduate and an animator at the studio. In 1984, he was given his supposed big break with “Frankenweenie.” The piece was intended to unspool before a re-release of “Pinocchio.”
No such luck. Disney execs refused to release the film in America and tossed it into a vault, where it sat for more than a decade.
“Something about it freaked them out,” Burton says. “They said it was too dark. I’ve been getting that since early on in my career.”
But that was then. Now films like “ParaNorman,” a ghoul-filled animated movie about a boy who lifts a curse from his town, and 2009’s “Coraline” owe an obvious debt to Burton and pack in audiences. (“Coraline” director Henry Selick crafted “The Nightmare Before Christmas” with Burton. And “ParaNorman”
director Chris Butler was a storyboard artist for “Corpse Bride.”)
Even the recent Adam Sandler flick, “Hotel Transylvania,” has ghouls who bear a striking resemblance to some of Burton’s creatures.
“He’s definitely a major influence,” says Ron Magliozzi, an associate curator at the Museum of Modern Art who put together a 2009 Burton exhibition. “So many of the features that come out are Burton imitators.”
Magliozzi says Burton and 1993’s “The Nightmare Before Christmas” were partially responsible for saving animation, which had reached a dead end with traditional Disney-style flicks. Burton, along with Pixar, reinvented the genre, building an audience for sophisticated movies that could be enjoyed by adults and kids.
“Frankenweenie” producer Allison Abbate says Hollywood has come around to appreciating Burton’s vision, which was heavily influenced by Vincent Price movies he watched growing up, stop-motion pioneer Ray Harryhausen and the foggy cobblestone vibe of 19th century writers, including Edgar Allan Poe.
“I think that the sensibility of the people making those decisions [at the studios] has changed,” she says. “There is a darkness to ‘Frankenweenie,’ but the heart is so strong. This film does have something to say to a family audience.”
Victor Frankenstein (voiced by Charlie Tahan) is a grade-school genius who dabbles in science and filmmaking and a classic Burton outsider. When his beloved dog is hit by a car, he resurrects the pooch using lightning, to the initial horror of his parents (Martin Short, Catherine O’Hara). After some of Victor’s classmates follow suit with their deceased pets, their small town is soon overrun by monsters.
The idea of dogs returning from the grave is a bit macabre, but the irony is that Disney’s mainstream animated films always had a bit of a sinister edge to them. Bambi’s mother is shot by a hunter, and in “Snow White,” the queen orders a huntsman to cut out the girl’s heart and bring it to her in a box.
“They said [my ‘Frankenweenie’ short] was too dark, but then they show ‘Pinocchio’ and kids are running screaming out of the theater because there are scary parts in it,” Burton jokes. “Disney was founded on that sort of thing. If it was all the light and fluffy stuff, there would be no Disney movies.”
As more evidence of Burton’s value and audience’s shifting tastes, “The Nightmare Before Christmas” was initially deemed too dark by Disney. “The audience wasn’t there because the studio didn’t know what to do with it,” says “Frankenweenie” producer Don Hahn. “It wasn’t released as a Disney movie, it was released as a Touchstone movie [a Disney subsidiary].”
The movie was later released on DVD under the Disney label after becoming a cult hit.
The director had an easier time making his current film.
“Tim is at a different place in his career now, so there were far fewer dissenters this time around,” Hahn says. “There may have been a few raised eyebrows about the decision to shoot it in black and white 3-D, but that was down to having Tim explain that this is as much an homage to horror movies as anything, and it’s something you haven’t seen before.”
The director decided to use stop-motion for the update, in part, because he liked the parallels with the story; both involve inanimate objects coming to life. “Then, there was the element of loving monster movies and ‘Frankenstein’ in particular,” he adds, “and the wish fulfillment of bringing something back was very powerful.”
“Frankenweenie” took some three years to make, requiring animators to carefully stop and position handmade puppets 24 times to get one second of footage. Despite the work and oversight required for “Frankenweenie,” Burton doesn’t think he’s necessarily a better filmmaker now than when he made the short.
“I could have been better when I was 10 years old,” he says half-seriously. “I am regressing.”
Every director should be so lucky.