Halloween Movie Review - Corpse Bride
Tim Burton's Animated Emo Love Triangle
Corpse Bride opened in 2005 in 2nd place, behind the Jodie Foster airplane thriller Flightplan. It was nominated for a Best Animated Feature Oscar for that year, but lost to Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit. While it's certainly made money, especially when distributed worldwide, it has never quite shaken the stigma of being "that other Tim Burton animated movie that's not The Nightmare Before Christmas". But does it deserve that stigma? Can it stand on its own? The answers are yes, and almost.
Getting Married in the Mourning
Loosely based on an old Russian-Jewish folktale, the film takes place in a small town in 19th Century Europe. Johnny Depp is the voice of Tim Burton, a pale, sunken-eyed, navel-gazing director with tousled hair who...wait. Apologies. Johnny Depp is actually the voice of Victor Van Dort, a pale, sunken-eyed, navel-gazing young boy with tousled hair, who is arranged to be married to the daughter in a (supposedly) rich local family (Emily Watson). Practicing his vows in the nearby forest, Victor accidentally awakens a dead bride buried there (Helena Bonham Carter) and gets sucked into a surprisingly vibrant afterlife to be her husband.
Smorgasbored
Stylistically, the film is a veritable witches' brew of elements from other Burton works; a dash of Edward Scissorhands for the protagonist, a pinch of Beetlejuice to flavor the afterlife sequences, and a very healthy dose of Nightmare for the art direction. It's not that these elements are bad, per se; it's that their familiarity holds the film back from feeling fresh in any way. Even Danny Elfman, the composer of Nightmare, returns to write the few songs for the score. His music has always been happy to sit a few steps left of center, melodically, to the extent that not a lot of his work is very memorable, or special.
The script is not all that clever, or even very funny. Most of the humor comes from obvious, morbid puns about the various inhabitants of the afterlife; the "head waiter" is just a head, for example, ha ha. The absolute height of hilarity to the screenwriters seems to be a completely random reference to Gone With the Wind, an anachronism to the story's time period, and a joke that most kids, the intended audience, won't even get.
In addition, it's probably best not to dwell too much here on who gets to leave the afterlife and visit the real world, or how. The rules are kind of loose and inconsistent.
What About the Children?
That being said, Corpse Bride isn't a bad movie by any means. It merely suffers in comparison to other works of the same genre. It's pretty to look at, containing enough eye candy and morbid fun to keep the kids spooked yet safe, especially if they do like The Nightmare Before Christmas and want more of the same.
Though perhaps the term "eye candy" is a bit improper when referring to a maggot that looks like Peter Lorre.
Corpse Bride
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