A stop-motion animated movie in black-and-white and 3D. Who'd think of that? Try Tim Burton, the undisputed wizard of odd who's been yearning to do a full-length feature of the live-action short he made in 1984 when he toiled as an animator at Disney.

Well, now Frankenweenie is here, and it's a honey, a dark and dazzling spellbinder that scares up laughs and surprising emotion. Only Burton, inspired by his own time growing­ up different in suburban California, could envision this Frankenstein-inspired tale of a boy scientist named Victor (voiced by Charlie Tahan) who invents a machine to bring his dog, Sparky, back from the dead. It's not just his parents (Martin Short and Catherine O'Hara) who are horrified. The whole neighborhood is in a spin, especially Edgar "E" Gore (Atticus Shaffer), a deformed pal of Victor's. Burton's artistry is on par with his animated imaginings in Corpse Bride and The Nightmare Before Christmas. Getting creeped out has never seemed this totally cool.

“Everything in Its Right Place”

Thom Yorke hit rock bottom the moment he walked offstage after a 1997 concert in Birmingham, England, which initially left him unable to speak and later led him to write the eerie, discombobulated “Everything.” “Lots of people say that song is gibberish,” he told Rolling Stone. “It’s not. It’s totally about that” – the mute paralysis that had swept over Yorke after the Birmingham show, which stayed with him through the simultaneous recording of Kid A and Amnesiac. Quoting the song’s repeated line, “Yesterday I woke up sucking a lemon,” Yorke twisted his face into a ferocious grimace, explaining, “That’s the face I had for three years.”