Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride is the official full title of the film I saw tonight, but Corpse Bride would have sufficed. Nowhere else but from Burton will you get such a mix of sinewy Edward Gorey-like characters, macabre plot and details, and every possible pun you can make about death in a PG movie. You’ll also find Johnny Depp voicing a character quite like that milquetoast Ichabod Crane, and similar to many of Burton’s other weird, stunted-kid characters: the Edwards Scissorhands and Wood, Pee-Wee Herman, Batman and Willy Wonka.
Burton began his career as an artist for Disney (he storyboarded The Black Cauldron and was an animator for The Fox and the Hound) and I theorize that while there, he picked up what R. Crumb has called “the Cuteness Curse,” which refers to Crumb’s first-real-job stint as a card illustrator for American Greetings. Only when you mix cuteness with the dark world vision of someone like Crumb or Burton do you get such unexpectedly strange and engaging results as you see in Burton’s works.
Like The Nightmare Before Christmas, Corpse Bride boasts stunning stop-motion animation, this time around of silicon-skinned models and supplemented with a few computer effects. The character design is remarkable, especially for Victor, Victoria his fiancée (voiced by Emily Watson), and the Corpse Bride (voiced by Helena Bonham Carter), each wispily thin and with cueball eyes—behind one of the Corpse Bride’s lives a Peter Lorre-like inchworm sidekick. They’ve rendered in ashen porcelain colors and textures, and constrictive Victorian dress, but have surprising fluidity of movement. Equally memorable supporting characters are Victor’s parents, his mother Nell like the Bride of Frankenstein, and his father William, squat and froggy like Tweedledum. I also enjoyed the town crier, who seems to get his news instantaneously and relishes in broadcasting it loudly.
The film isn’t as much as a musical as I remember Nightmare being, with shorter, less memorable songs that don’t serve advance the plot much, other than the impressive “welcome to the land of the dead” number, featuring a bombastic gallery of dancing skeletons and other animated stiffs. Another great scene occurs when the cast of underworld characters arrives in the land of the living to enliven a boring dinner party.
You likely already know the film’s basic story—Victor accidentally marries the murdered bride instead of Victoria. Meanwhile, a cad moves in on Victoria, while Victor tries to figure out how to weasel out of his deathly nuptials. At the denouement is a brilliant and funny mêlée between Victor and the villain, topped with some predictable comeuppance and a happy ending all around.