The dead shall rise...and get married

CORPSE BRIDE (2005)

Reviewed by Jerry Saravia

        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 with vivid musical numbers featuring 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.