In Tim Burton’s eyes, the land of the living is pale and gray, while the land of the dead is bright and snappy. Figures, right? The director of “Sleepy Hollow” and “Ed Wood” would opt for the macabre.
That’s the way it plays out in “Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride,” a slim but endearing new film. This one is rendered in stop-motion animation, the laborious technique Burton previously used in “The Nightmare Before Christmas.”
| Morbid but funny: A stop-motion animation tale of a groom who inadvertently finds himself wed to a rotting corpse, the movie is full of wonderful creations and designs.
Rated: PG-13 for subject matter. Now showing: Everett 9, Galaxy 12, Loews at Alderwood, Marysville 14, Mountlake 9, Stanwood, Meridian 16, Neptune, Oak Tree, Woodinville 12, Cascade, Oak Harbor Plaza 3 |
The story comes from an old folk tale. On the day before his wedding, a prospective groom named Victor (given voice by Johnny Depp) goes walking in the woods. Inadvertently, he recites his vows before a hidden grave, and finds himself married to the half-rotted corpse buried beneath his feet.
She (Helena Bonham Carter) whisks her new husband away to meet the gang, a collection of skeletons and spooks who reside in what looks like a juke joint below ground. Frankly, they’re a lot more fun than the dreary, class-conscious folks up top.
Nevertheless, Victor still has a date to wed Victoria (Emily Watson), who seems nice enough and who, after all, has a pulse. This is going to be tricky.
The animation in the film is so advanced and fluid that I thought at least part of the movie was done with computer animation. But it’s still the old one-frame-at-a-time method of moving puppets around, although these puppets are larger than usual and have a greater degree of facial dexterity than in the past.
It’s probably redundant to say the design in a Tim Burton movie is wonderful, but it really is. The Victorian-era sets overlap with “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,” and the character designs are terrific. The Corpse Bride, a fetching combination of sex kitten and medical cadaver, will give comic-book geeks everywhere a new reason to live.
The parents of Victor and Victoria are a hilarious collection of mugwumps and gargoyles (among the voices are Albert Finney and Tracey Ullman). There’s also a fearsome reverend (Christopher Lee) and Victoria’s fatuous suitor (Richard E. Grant), a man with a chin larger than his brain.
Longtime Burton composer Danny Elfman contributes some songs, the best of which is a toe-tapper in the underworld. Burton, who co-directed the film with Mike Johnson, keeps the film moving at a brisk clip. The voices are engaging, with Depp and Bonham Carter (Burton’s favorite leading man and missus, respectively) playing it straighter than you might expect.
The result is funny and dear (and not exactly for little kids, given the morbid focus of much of the picture).
“Corpse Bride” doesn’t have a huge finish, but it creates enough slightly decayed magic to make it memorable.
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