Something Cult, Foreign-Language or Indie #164: DOUBLE FEATURE! Frankenweenie (1984 / 2012).

When his beloved Bull Terrier, Sparky, chases a ball across the street and fatally meets a car, young Victor Frankenstein (Barret Oliver) is devastated. So much so, that he unsuccessfully feigns illness to get out of attending school. But when his science teacher shows the class about the miracle of reanimation, a light switch is flicked in Victor's head. With that entire lesson having firmly sunk into his brain, Victor now races home and gets to work. Then, with a big dose of electricity, Sparky is reborn! Victor now tries to keep the new Sparky hidden, but being a dog he is naturally restless and adventurous, and so it isn't long before Victor's parents (Shelley Long and Daniel Stern, then Catherine O'Hara and Martin short) and the neighbours meet his revived self.

Tim Burton's two takes on this parody/homage to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein are rather different but obviously they essentially tell the same story. The original 1984 version is a 30-minute, black-and-white short, while the 2012 remake is 90 minutes and animated, but again black-and-white.

Both versions are delightful, and can stand on their own because of how Burton (perhaps with the passage of time between them) consciously and wisely infuses both with a different narrative flavour and insight. The 1984 version works the macabre and subversive central story around a very familiar depiction of post-WWII American suburbia, in order to expose just how dark and exclusionary those neighbourhoods could actually be. In the 2012 version, however, Burton seeks to uncover the fear of difference and the unknown that still lies under the boilerplate of modern suburbia. When he's not trying to welcome us into lands of pure, imagined weirdness, Burton invokes these anxieties and prejudices to become a very speculative but blunt and sincere polemicist as a filmmaker.

You can watch one version, or both; it's your choice. Regardless, Tim Burton is one of my ultimate artistic heroes, and both versions of Frankenweenie rank among his best and most resonant work.