The Corpse Bride Review
by Jerry Saravia (faustus_08520 AT yahoo DOT com)October 5th, 2005
CORPSE BRIDE (2005)
Reviewed by Jerry Saravia
RATING: Three stars
Tim Burton's "Corpse Bride" is a return to the stop-motion
animation of his incredibly inventive film from 1993, "The
Nightmare Before Christmas." Is it as good? Not quite, but
it is no downer either and has enough wit and imagination to
rise above most animated films of late.
Johnny Depp voices the lead character, a worrisome wart
named Victor who's about to get married to Victoria (Emily
Watson), an also highly demure girl. Victoria's parents are
the Everglots, Maudeline and Finnie (Joanna Lumley and
Albert Finney), a couple of dour people who don't like each
other and maintain a house of dour paintings of their ancestors.
The Everglots look forward to this union because Victor's parents,
Nell and William Van Dort (Tracey Ullman and Paul Whitehouse),
are wealthy fishmongers who would lend financial stability and
some status to them in this colorless town. Victor has trouble at
the wedding rehearsal and wonders if this union is something he
really wants. He crosses a bridge into a world where corpses and
skeletons walk about. Before you can say that this is an animated
version of "Night of the Living Dead" crossed with Ray Harryhausen,
Victor mistakenly places his wedding ring in the finger of a female
corpse named Emily (voiced by Helena Bonham Carter)! Worse
yet, he does so while preparing his vows! Now Emily thinks she
is the lucky bride-to-be, fulfilling her dream of walking up the altar.
"Corpse Bride" is not a wicked black comedy nor is it suffused with
any gore gags (though there is a maggot with a Peter Lorre voice).
In fact, it is hardly as wicked as "Nightmare Before Christmas" and
I suppose that is what I miss. Tim Burton has often suffused his own
fairy tales, such as "Edward Scissorhands," with a dark sense of
humor. Burton at his best epitomized the rose with a black cherry
on top that would ooze a trickle of blood. That is not to say that his
films were always nasty or violent but the threat was always there
with ominous atmosphere and ghastly characters. "Nightmare Before
Christmas" had some of that, including a lead character named Jack
Skellington who loved Halloween and dressed up as Santa Claus
giving horrendous contraptions as gifts to kids on Christmas.
"Corpse Bride" is not filled with such humor - it is lighter fare with
a love story as its focus (The same was true with Burton's last picture,
"Big Fish").
Don't read this as a negative review. There is much to admire in
"Corpse Bride." The movie occasionally has raucous energy, sometimes
taking it up an extra notch on vivid musical numbers with skeletons (though the
songs don't rate as memorably as Oogie Boogie's song or Jack
Skellington's "What's This?" from "Nightmare Before Christmas"). I love
the look of the film, basic Burtonian visuals with the grayish,
black-and-white world of some aristocratic society coupled with bursts of
color in the world of the Land of the Dead (Once again, corpses are
always more colorful than humans). The animation is extraordinary in
every sense of the word. The characters are engaging enough, though
Depp's Victor was somewhat standoffish to me. The soul of the movie
is really poor Emily whose eyeball is always popping out of its socket -
she may be dead but she wants to be loved like everyone else.
"Corpse Bride" is good enough and clever enough, and I smiled through
most of it. The ending is stunningly beautiful and rhapsodic. But the film
lacks the flavor and the sense of dread that we've come to expect from
Burton. Perhaps time has caught up with him and we no longer see the
surprise in watching an animated cadaverous underworld. Such
sanguineless characters deserve more than a pretty little love story.
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