Tim Burton fans will not be disappointed by Corpse Bride. It’s pretty much paint-by-numbers Burton material with his signature romantic take on a dark fairy tale, upbeat representation of sinister worlds, quirky humour and visual thrills.
The film tells of Victor (voiced by Johnny Depp) and Victoria (voiced by Emily Watson), two shy romantics who are being married without ever having met. Victor’s parents are nouveau riche fish canners and Victoria’s are of noble descent, but their money has run dry. It’s a marriage of convenience. Victor and Victoria are sad about this and still clinging to the idea of true love.
But when they meet at the rehearsal on the eve of the wedding, it seems as though this might just work. Yet Victor stumbles through his lines, sets his future mother-in-law’s dress on fire and is eventually expelled from the rehearsal with the command that he has to learn his lines.
Dismal and depressed, he roams through the forest practising his lines, eventually getting them right and placing the ring on a twig with a flourish. Through this, he awakens the corpse bride (voiced by Helena Bonham Carter) who believes she has finally been betrothed to her true love. She sweeps Victor down to the Land of the Dead.
True to Burton style, the Land of the Dead seems livelier than the grey bureaucratic Land of the Living, recalling the otherworld of Beetlejuice. It’s party-time all year round and a loving community are frivolous and endearing towards each other.
Bonham Carter’s corpse bride is gentle and charming, evoking the utmost sympathy. As an audience member, one is torn. Victor has to return to the Land of the Living to marry Victoria, but one really doesn’t want the corpse bride’s heart to be broken either. Unfortunately, while this sympathy was probably meant for Victor, he seems too pathetic to earn it; his brides upstage him.
While the film fills out the Burton bill to a tee, and even recalls the visual style of The Nightmare Before Christmas, he hasn’t yet exhausted his gloomy imagination and concise directorial attention to detail that brings this unique medium to life. A number of innovations to the medium also ensure a novel experience.
Whereas previously a number of “replacement heads” were used to animate facial expressions, an intricate gearing mechanism inside the puppets’ heads was used in Corpse Bride to manipulate the faces by tiny increments. Fusing animatronics with stop-motion animation, the expressions are more diverse and the animation smoother.
The gear mechanisms in the head required that the puppets be larger than normal and the sets had to be scaled accordingly. The grand scale then made it hard for animators and the camera crew to get in and manipulate the puppets. Sets were built around animators, with trap-doors allowing them to access the puppets while they watched the action on monitors below the set.
Corpse Bride is also the first stop-motion animation to use digital still cameras for shooting, allowing animators access to instant feedback regarding the shots and lighting. Programmed, motion-controlled cameras give a three-dimensional cinematic fluidity. The end-result looks better than three-dimensionally rendered films such as Shrek. Burton puts this down to the tactile nature of the medium.
It is a heart-warming horror comedy that incorporates all his favourite staff: co-director Mike Johnson (The Nightmare Before Christmas), designer Alex McDowell (Charlie and the Chocolate Factory) and actors Depp (Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Sleepy Hollow and Edward Scissorhands) and Bonham Carter (Planet of the Apes, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Big Fish). Corpse Bride is thoroughly entertaining and absorbing, with breathtaking visual wit and style. It proves the Burton formula is not yet exhausted.