Death Becomes Her

Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride Has Heart & Memorable Characters

If only the rest of this summer’s movies had boasted characters as original and memorable as the animated ghouls and humans populating the Gothic claymation world of Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride. In a scant 75 minutes, the macabre-loving director of darkness introduces his viewers to about two-dozen animated characters, all with quirks, foibles and personality flaws to spare.

“I write the songs that make the dead girls cry...not a Barry Manilow fan, I take it?” Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter star as Victor and Emily in Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride.

Burton does this while spinning a spider’s web yarn of love, duplicity, death, cowardice, revenge and murder. It is really quite an achievement and one that puts Burton’s production company on the same level as Pixar and Dreamworks as being a major force in making today one of the golden eras of animation.

Corpse Bride utilizes many of Burton’s “usual suspects” for voice-over work, music, and behind the scenes chores. Longtime Burton cohort Johnny Depp stars as Victor Van Dort, a sensitive young man with spindly legs and spooky eyes who is soon to marry Victoria (Emily Watson) in an arranged marriage in what appears to be Victorian England or New England. His parents are nouveau riche and hers are lordly with tracts of land yet little ready cash. Although he takes an instant liking to his bride-to-be, he muffs his wedding vows so badly during the rehearsal that he escapes to the solitude of the woods to practice. Mistaking a dead hand coming out of grave for a tree limb, he places Victoria’s wedding band on the finger of newly deceased Emily (Helena Bonham Carter) and says his vows.

Thus he becomes husband to one of the most lovable yet dead characters in film history: The Corpse Bride.

The success of the movie rests squarely on the slim shoulders of the title character and Bonham Carter gives her Emily sass and strength along with the solemn air befitting a gal murdered on her wedding night. Visually she is both ghostly and beautiful with exquisite arms and legs that unfortunately have bones sticking out of them. She is quite content to keep Victor in the underworld but caring enough to show him how he can visit his living loved ones once more. Emily is a character of complex feelings and motives and Bonham Carter pulls it off with aplomb.

The bizarre menagerie of characters that Victor meets in the land of the dead are far more alive than those occupying the earth and Burton seems to be drawing a parallel between this colorful realm and his own world of imagination. One particular character, the maggot that lives behind Emily’s eyeball and speaks in a voice like Peter Lorre, seems to have more feeling and conscience than most of the people populating 95% of the movies that have come out this year.

Once again Burton has relied upon the music of composer Danny Elfman to create mood music and songs for one of his films. Once again Elfman is much more successful with the instrumental passages than he is with the songs. Elfman, a prodigious collaborator with Burton, desperately needs to find his own collaborator when it comes to writing lyrics (Bernie Taupin or Tim Rice doing anything these days?).

Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride will no doubt be compared to the director’s earlier venture in stop-motion animation, The Nightmare Before Christmas. Both are tailor-made holiday classics for Halloween and have a ton of stylistic and musical properties in common. Stand them side-by-side, however, and you’ll see how Burton and his crew have elevated the animation techniques to new levels of smoothness and ingenuity with the new film. You’ll also see that Bonham Carter’s title character is one of the most lovable and intrinsically unique ever created for an animated feature.

Sweet, funny and in many ways heartbreaking, Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride is much more than a typical romp in the director’s macabre little fantasyland. Go see it with someone you love.

Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride is rated PG for some scary images and action, and brief mild language. It is currently playing at the Regal Cinema in Boone.