PHOTO–MELBOURNE, AUSTRALIA – JUNE 23: American director Tim Burton speaks at the unveiling of ‘Tim Burton: The Exhibition’ at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image on June 23, 2010 in Melbourne, Australia. The exhibition features over 700 works from paintings to storyboards to puppets spanning the filmmaker’s career. (Photo by Scott Barbour/Getty Images)
News was released today that Tim Burton is in talks to direct another remake–this time, it’s The Addams Family. It might be shot in black and white, reminiscent of the retro television show, and of course, it’s going to have the classic Tim Burton goth-art stamp, but will it hold up to 1991′s The Addams Family and1993′s Addams Family Values?
It’s actually pretty futile to even discuss whether or not the movie will tank when it’s not even a concrete idea yet, but I do have some advice for Burton and the production crew–he shouldn’t deviate too far from the original dynamic The Addams Family capitalized on, or, if he does have some new ideas for the family, just make sure they keep the same macabre humor and overly-dramatic sensibilities in check. The last thing I think the public wants is another Alice in Wonderland.
You can read what I wrote about the film here, but just to paraphrase myself, the film was disjointed at best and confusing at worst. It was hard to keep up with the new changes to the story everyone was familiar with, and it took everyone off guard. The storyline also flowed too quickly and many characters weren’t developed enough. Overall, it seemed the movie suffered from having too much attention spent toward the artistic look of the film.
This can also be argued to an extent with The Corpse Bride. As the stop-motion follow-up work to Burton’s cult classic Nightmare Before Christmas, the movie seemed more concerned with its overall look and interjecting songs that sometimes felt half-baked instead of also building a bit more on the characters’ personalities. Unlike Alice, however, you do feel more attached to The Corpse Bride characters than you do to the Alice characters, but if closer attention were paid toward the plot instead of trying to make a second Nightmare, then the film would have done much better.
The thing that made the first Addams Family movies great was the fact that so much time was spent on character development, plot, and artistic direction. Nothing was sacrificed for the sake of something else. It’s very easy to just focus on making the Addams family look gothic and stylized, but without any pathos to back up that extreme look, you just get Alice in Wonderland–you end up not caring about anyone or anything in the movie except for the movie’s length. If Burton recognizes the mistakes he made in Alice and corrects them in his upcoming movies, like The Addams Family, then everything will be okay.
What do you guys think? Should movie-goers be worried , or is Tim Burton perfect for The Addams Family?
