As usual with Burton the intricately-crafted dream world of his goth(ic), leather-clad, metallic Frankenstein who is not long for the grotesquely "normal" pastel suburbs due to his nonconforming outsider status is more of interest for the elaborate, comic-visual poses it gives him an excuse to do than anything else; god the production design is still unbelievable, and all the distorted wide-angle shots of the various rooms. However, in this case, letting his weird imaginative design choices run loose and complicate the otherwise fairy-tale simplicity of its romance actually does kind of work in its favor, even if its pervading sense of loneliness and feelings of being lost out of time or being a true weirdo outsider does sort of come from a hilarious, self-mythologizing place in retrospect.

It helps that Elfman was obviously at his peak in this era and Winona was an all-timer teen Josh crush (between this and Dracula), but since my last watch was over a decade ago I legitimately forgot how stacked the ing turns were as well: Alan Arkin, Vincent Price, Dianne Wiest, Anthony Michael Hall, Kathy Baker all deliver.