Tim Burton's Corpse Bride
By: Mark Runyon | Category: Film Reviews | 10/08/05 | 09:31 PM
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Grade: B | Genre: Animation
Summary: Corpse Bride is a solid film with quality animation, a few holes in the storyboard and a crisis of audience. Fans of Tim Burton will be pleasantly surprised to see what the old master has conjured up this go around.
Years from now, we will look back on Tim Burton's films and see him as quite the visionary of our time. He redefined cool in starting the Batman franchise, showed us quirky can be riveting with Edward Scissorhands, and that cartoons aren't always for children in the Nightmare Before Christmas. He follows-up on his dark animated wonder with his latest creation Corpse Bride, just in time for Halloween. It's an intriguing little tale of 19th century marriage, mistaken proposals and finding love in the most unlikely of places. Its cleverly punny while coming together as the sweetest display of Claymation ever committed to film. |
Now I have to preface this piece by saying that animated features just aren't my thing. I can appreciate them, but, like musicals, characters tend to annoying break into song every so often. Also given that their target audience is children, the story/dialogue oft times leaves much to be desired. Corpse Bride easily overcomes this second issue with a rich script that is layered so nicely that it could easily play for children, but there are a lot of nuances that only adults will pick up on. This might double as the film's biggest problem -- who is its audience? It seems a little too dark and death-centric to be for children, yet, unless you're swearing up a storm like South Park, would you consider this an adult oriented film? Its box office results show that this hasn't been a problem so perhaps the reality falls somewhere in between.
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| What do you mean I only get to sleep with one clay figurine for the rest of my life? |
| Tim Burton's Corpse Bride |
| Starring: Voices of Johnny Depp, Helena Bonham Carter, Emily Watson, Tracey Ullman & Christopher Lee |
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| View the Trailer (Quicktime) |
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The film takes place during turn of the century Europe -- 19th that is. We meet two sets of high society parents, arranging a marriage of their children for very different reasons. One is a Lord who has lost all the money that goes along with their title while the other is nouveau rich and looking to buy their way into royalty. The feelings of their children seem to be of little consequence in the matter. Victor is painfully shy and klutzy. If he reminds you of Johnny Depp, that's because Mr. 21 Jumpstreet teams up once again with his Scissorhands director to offer his vocal presence as Victor. Victoria has been so sheltered by her parents that she has been able to explore very few of her interests. In their one real scene together, Victor charms her with his piano playing, and the buds of love start to peek through. The problem is Victor continually flubs his vows during the wedding rehearsal, and the priest postpones the wedding until he can get his act together. Victor wanders out into the woods to work through his mental block. While practicing sliding the ring on a branch, a woman, in full bridal gear, sprouts out of the ground to accept his hand in marriage. She is in fact dead or a corpse bride as she's later referred to. Her arms and legs are bones that frequently fail to stay attached mid-walk, and her eye seems to pop out every time the worm camped out inside her head needs to get a line in. For the most part, she still seems to have maintained the flesh on her face and her full head of hair. The way women assault their hair; I'd think that would be the first to go after death comes knocking.
So Victor gets whisked away to the underworld where a colorful cast of heartbeat-challenged folk sing and dance just having a merry old time. Victor is freaked out, realizing he just made a colossal blunder and tries to scheme a way to get back on the other side of the River Styx. Emily, our corpse bride, starts to sway Victor's mind on the undead, giving him back a cherished friend as a wedding present and displaying aspects of herself that the sheltered Victoria lacks. The fun is further complicated when Victoria's parents newly betroth her to the evil Lord Barkis.
The animation is probably the film's greatest asset. It is done in stop-motion format. This is an animation technique in which static objects appear to be moving. This is a device regularly used in Claymation, and Burton also utilized it in the Nightmare Before Christmas. It is very seamless and fluid. Burton uses color and black and white to separate our two realms. Curiously color represents the underworld, and strangely it seems to have ten times more life than those on fuddy duddies the surface. When we enter the depths of the below, the film plays a lot like another one of Burton's features Beetlejuice in its general eccentricies.
The story is short, clocking in around an hour and twenty minutes, and that brevity causes some areas not to be adequately fleshed out. When Victor ultimately makes his choice, you can't really see what is behind his decision because the connection was never established between the two characters. What the script may lack in depth, it makes up for in wry humor. When Victor's parents find out he's mistakenly been married off to a corpse bride his mother replies, "what corpse would marry Victor?"
Ultimately, this is a solid film with quality animation, a few holes in the storyboard and a crisis of audience. I don't know that I'd necessarily give parents the green flag on taking kids to see this, due to its dark tone and subject matter, but I guess that PG rating is there for a reason. Fans of Tim Burton will be pleasantly surprised to see what the old master has conjured up this go around. As nameless woman in Singles said, "Debbie, he's only like the next Martin Scorsese."
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