Tim Burton’s latest animated film, CORPSE BRIDE,
is a whimsical bit of the macabre, gussied up with
the rapture of first love in both its full flowering
and something more sinister. It’s Petit Guignol
as light and fluffy as a corner full of cobwebs and,
once you get used to the talking maggots, the
rotting flesh and such to be found in many of the
stop-action animated figures, a sweet little
story with a light humor and real heart, or rather
hearts, some of them actually beating.
accidental, as the sensitive Victor (voiced by Johnny
Depp) summons as much courage as he can
muster to face the marriage his nouveau riche
distinctly déclassé parents have arranged to
Victoria (voiced by Emily Watson), the demure and
dutiful daughter of trop classe, and distinctly
snooty, minor nobility with an unfortunate cash
flow problem. As in none. Fortunately for the
attractive couple, they find each other charming,
which makes the prospect of their wedding the
day after their meeting palatable all around. A disastrous rehearsal, a future in-law nearly
becomes a bonfire, leaves Victor wandering the
woods in the, ahem, dead of night, reciting his
vows so as to be letter perfect on the big day.
Alas, he doesn’t just recite the vows, he mimes
them, including slipping the ring onto what he
thinks is a branch. It’s not. Instead of a nubile
bride, the title character (voiced by Helena Bonham
Carter), as much exposed bone as pallid flesh,
claims him for her own and takes him below to
the land of the dead in order to commence the
connubial bliss she didn’t find in life. As with all Burton’s films, the art direction is
highly stylized and wondrous to behold. The
shapes of the living characters explore the
extremes of configuration, from all but perfectly
spherical to as spindly as a concretion of
matchsticks. Hairdos soar above their owners
like effulgent hot air balloons barely tethered to
scalp. The idioms and the monochromatic palette
used in some sequences conjure those favored by
Universal Studio when it was actively producing
its golden age of horror films. Yet in the end it is
more form than substance, a simulacrum that is
as almost as dry as the bones that dance through
the song and dance numbers punctuating the course of
its 76 minutes of running time. Those below ground are not just more interesting,
but also friendlier and certainly more fun than the
vast majority of the living, a situation not exploited
to its fullest potential for the odd tension that it
should have created in the living groom who
wants to escape, but is actually having a good
time. Even the art direction has made the dead
more colorful than the living. Certainly the
eponymous bride, for all the emotional baggage
she carries, is more, further ahem, lively company
than her mortal counterpart, who has the demure thing
going for her but little else.
For all the visual similarities to Burton’s A NIGHTMARE BEFORE CHRISTMAS, CORPSE BRIDE, which he co-directed and for which he provided the story but not the screenplay, is not on that level of giddy delight, nor does it approach his EDWARD SCISSORHANDS in the evocation of the complexity that is the gnawing bliss of romance. That delicious, subversive edginess is AWOL, ground down to the cinematic equivalent of a butter knife.
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