...the visuals are so good and the voices so colorful, you probably won't mind the film's minor shortcomings.
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It was a big year for Tim Burton, who had not only "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory" hitting the big screen in 2005, but "Corpse Bride" as well. Not that either "Charlie" or "Bride" were among Burton's very best work, but they are filled with the writer/producer/director's typical quirkiness, bizarre theatricality, and general merriment.
So, look in "Corpse Bride" for all of Burton's usual trademarks: You'll find the stop-motion animation of "The Nightmare Before Christmas." You'll find the land of the dead from "Beetle Juice." You'll find the dark tone of "Batman" and "Sleep Hollow." You'll find the familiar songs and music of Danny Elfman, especially reminiscent of "Edward Scissorhands." You'll find the starring voice of Johnny Depp. And, of course, you'll find the various ghoulish characters and sundry delights for which Burton is so enamoured.
What you won't find is much story line or much innovation beyond the obvious. The movie is only seventy-eight minutes long, so there is not a lot of plot or character development. Moreover, the seventy-eight minutes are probably too long for the thin narrative. Still and all, the visuals are so good and the voices so colorful, you probably won't mind the film's minor shortcomings. I found it fun, cute, and mostly absorbing throughout.
The story involves a naive young man named Victor Van Dort (Depp) on the day before his marriage to an equally naive young woman, Victoria Everglot (Emily Watson). The setting is vaguely Victorian England, and the marriage is one of convenience. It's an arranged affair between a once-rich and now impoverished family of snobs, the Everglots, and a nouveau-riche family of fish merchants, the Van Dorts. Victor and Victoria only meet on the day before their wedding, but they instantly fall in love.
Nevertheless, poor Victor has serious anxieties about the marriage and keeps messing up his part of the wedding rehearsal. As a result, the minister, Pastor Galswells (Christopher Lee), orders him to go out and memorize his lines. Walking in a nearby wood, Victor practices putting the ring on what he thinks is the branch of a tree, all the time reciting his marriage vows, only to find that the branch is not a branch at all but the protruding finger of a corpse! It's the corpse of a bride (Helena Bonham Carter) who died on her wedding day, and she's only too willing to accept Victor as her new partner. She immediately drags him down to the land of the dead, from which he has to spend the rest of the story trying to get out.
Almost everything about this PG-rated film is sly and cunning, although it might be a wee bit scary for younger children. For older children and adults, however, there are any number of clever touches. The color scheme, for instance, changes from dull and drab in the upstairs world of the living to far more vivid and colorful in the downstairs world of the dead, an obvious play on the old TV series "Upstairs, Downstairs," where the downstairs world was far more lively than the upstairs world of stiff aristocrats. Here, we find the upstairs world inhabited by people like the arrogant, overbearing Everglot parents (Albert Finney and Joanne Lumley); the coarse Van Dort parents (Paul Whitehouse and Tracey Ullman); and the mysterious and treacherous Lord Barkis Bittern (Richard E. Grant).
In the land of dead it's a different story. It's populated by skeletons (like Bonejangles, voiced by Danny Elfman), ghosts, ghouls, and other grotesqueries. The head waiter at an underworld night club is just that--a head on a platter. The unearthly pastor is Elder Gutknecht (Michael Gough, the old Alfred of "Batman" fame), and another character has the likely name of General Bonesapart (Deep Roy).
Unlike many recent animated films, the voice characterizations in "Corpse Bride" are genuinely distinctive; and unlike many recent animations, most of the characters are genuinely poignant or memorable. The Corpse Bride, Emily, for example, is a lovely, lonely, very special lady, no matter that she's rotting away and her right eye keeps popping out. She longs for a normal way of life with someone to love, and we long for her to succeed. Emily is so sympathetic, in fact, that it becomes difficult for us to know which heroine to root for, the live one or the dead one. Yet in the end it all works out in the director's usual sentimental way.
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[release]17380[/release]