Tim Burton's Corpse Bride

Tim Burton started his career in animation, first by making his own strange animated shorts, and later as an employee of Walt Disney Studios. His first full-length animated feature (devised by Burton but directed by stop-motion expert Henry Selick) was The Nightmare Before Christmas, an absurdly entertaining and eerily beautiful classic. I love everything about that film - the trippy designs, the bizarre cast of weird characters, Danny Elfman's original songs and musical performance as Jack Skellington. And the stop-motion itself is dazzling, not quite realistic but surprisingly fluid and smooth.

Corpse Bride, Burton's second attempt at a stop-motion feature, this time serving as a director, contains many of the same elements. Again, Burton has concocted an original, dark fairy tale and filled it with offbeat Elfman songs. Again, a large ensemble of peculiar characters populates a story obsessed with death and the macabre. And this time, the animation is even more beautifully rendered and ornately detailed than Nightmare Before Christmas, particularly in terms of sets. While the settings in the older film are bare-bones, and include few "moving parts" to allow animators more time to focus on character animation and facial expression, the entire world of Corpse Bride is baroque, lush and constantly in motion.

So how does the film go so wrong? Why is it suchan empty and lifeless exercize? How can a film uniting the talents of Johnny Depp, Tim Burton and Danny Elfman be such a bore?



Look at that shot! It's goregeous! This entire movie just pops off the screen. That entiresequence is taken up with two stop-motion characters playing a duet on a piano, and the entire thing is animated! Do you know how difficult and pain-staking that must have been to film? To recreate two sets of thin, dexterous fingers playing a melody together, with all the corresponding piano keys playing at the right speed in the proper order? Yikes.

But perhaps no 2005 film illustrates more clearly than Corpse Bride that engrossing visuals alone don't make for a satisfying time at the movies. Nightmare Before Christmas, though lovely in its own right, lacks the polish of this film, but the entire enterprise just feels more inspired.

I'm going to go ahead and place the lion's share of the blame on the shoulders of co-screenwriter John August. August has scripted the last several Burton films, as well as working on the Charlie's Angels movies. His scripts are perfunctory. They feel like outlines, even in their finished form. I enjoyed Burton's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory in spite of August's treacly script, one content mainly to recreate or reference the Dahl book and original film version, when it wasn't mucking everything up by adding a woefully stupid, pointless backstory about Willy Wonka's dad. The film worked because Burton managed to put so much energy and flair into the Chocolate Factory and the effects work, he succeeded in taking the focus off of the limp, bland writing.

I don't think Big Fish was salvagable at all, but the only things that work are Burton's visual innovations. The storytelling is awkward, the humor is forced and the dialogue is vapid and expository. I'm sorry, but this guy just isn't very good.

Here, credited alongside Pamela Pettler, he has concocted a confusing tale of the afterlife that doesn't really hold together particularly well. Interestingly, it reminded me of Monkeybone, the egregious Brendan Fraser live action/stop-motion hybrid directed by...Henry Selick. How strange.

In Monkeybone, Brendan Fraser goes into a coma and finds himself in Down Town, a sort of afterlife halfway house. While he's stuck in this odd universe where stop-motion characters drink and misbehave, a horny monkey voiced by John Leguizamo breaks out of Down Town and invades his human body back on Earth. Hilarity ensues.

In Corpse Bride, a nervous bridegroom named Victor (voiced by Johnny Depp), through a variety of dumb contrivances, accidentally marries a dead girl named Ellen (voiced by Helena Bonham Carter), much to the chagrin of his live betrothed Victoria (voiced by Emily Watson). Did you notice that Victor is set to marry a girl named Victoria? Yeah, that's the kind of joke you'll find all through Corpse Bride. Yessir, similar names...That's a humdinger.

Anyway, I think the biggest problem with this story is that the rules of The Undead are never really spelled out. You would think the guy who made Beetlejuice would have given this stuff a little bit of thought over the years...Apparently not. It seems like, once he's "married" Emily, Victor has to live underground, in the World of the Dead. Which is kind of weird, considering that he's alive. Later on, when the other dead people decide they'll have to kill Victor in order to keep him together with Emily, it only gets more confusing...If he's already down in the Underworld, why kill him?

You can't really get into a story that you don't understand, and August's script never once bothers to actually explain how marrying a corpse works. (At one point, Victoria goes to see the local priest, voiced by Christopher Lee, to ask him about marrying a corpse, but he refuses to give her an actual answer). Since we don't really get what's going on, aside from an inconvenience that involves a lot of singing, dancing skeletons, we can't emotionally invest in the action.

And...oh my gawd...those songs...Horrible.

Elfman did such great work for Burton earlier this year, rearranging all of Roald Dahl's Oompa-Loompa songs into those odd, groovy musical set pieces in the Chocolate Factory film. I suppose, to be fair, he doesn't have a lot to work with. Unlike Nightmare Before Christmas, which had a very clear, straight-forward and engaging plot for his songs to move along, most of the action of Corpse Bride is inert and internal.

The film opens with a song in which two pairs of evil, wealthy parents arrange a wedding for their children. The next song, sung by Elfman, relates the origin of the Corpse Bride, which sounds promising until you find out that the origin was that her betrothed abandoned her under a tree and she died. Not a whole lot to go on. (And the chorus of this song is irritating as hell.) There's even a duet sung by a spider and a maggot who looks and sounds like Peter Lorre. Actually, he doesn't, really...He looks and sounds like a maggot doing a bad impression of Peter Lorre. No thanks.

Believe me, it gives me no great pleasure to bash this film. I wanted to like it, really. I know the intense, long hours that went into producing a spectacle of this magnitude, and I'm sure everyone invovled went in with the best intentions, thought they were making some classic piece of family entertainment. Certainly, to be fair, young children may be captivated by the look of the film, the fast motion, the bouncy songs and the bright colors. Anyone over 8, however, will want to join the Corpse Bride and all her skeleton friends in the sweet release of death after about 15 minutes of this turkey.