Tim Burton's Corpse Bride

Tim Burton’s “Corpse Bride,” released in 2005, is not the chilling horror story the title tells, but a nice and visually romantic story of love lost. At a time when most animated films look completely bright and colorful, “Corpse Bride” creates two palettes, and not the ones we expect.

The world of the living is a dull and cloudy place with a lot of color sucked out, and the remaining grays and purples and greens so quiet they look apologetic. In other places, the world of the dead looks like the ideal vacation spot. It’s animated, happier and with brighter colors. Also, as the protagonist sees when he visits there, it is true when your pets die, they go to the same place you go: Victor Van Dort is greeted happily by Scraps the dog he had as a child. Roger Ebert said in his review, “Scraps, to be sure, is all bones, but look at it this way: No more fleas. Or maybe skeletal fleas. I'm not sure about all the fine points.”

Victor is voiced by Johnny Depp, and looking at the current trend in animation, he also looks like Johnny Depp. Ebert said, “Once cartoons were voiced by anonymous drudges, but now big names do the work, and lend their images to the characters.” As the movie starts, a marriage is being arranged between Victor’s parents and the Everglots. Nell and William Van Dort (Tracey Ullman and Paul Whitehouse) are right fishmongers. With Victoria Everglot (Emily Watson), her parents Maudeline and Finnis (Joanna Lumley and Albert Finney) are poor nobles. A marriage would give her family money and his family class. Ebert said, “Victor and Victoria have never met, except in the title of a Blake Edwards comedy, but when they're finally introduced, they're surprised to find that, despite everything, they love each other.”

But is it meant to be? Victor is so shy he cannot say the words of his marriage vow and runs to the wild graveyard outside the church to practice. Repeating the words to memorize them, he places the wedding ring on a twig that is not a twig but the desiccated finger of Emily, the Corpse Bride, voiced by Helena Bonham Carter, whose arm is reaching out from the grave. The marriage, according to the rules of the netherworld, makes sense, and soon Victor is at a wedding celebration where happy skeletons sing and dance to the music by Danny Elfman, and the wedding cake is made of bones but looks delicious.

The movie’s inspiration is to make Emily a character of sympathy, not horror. She lost her chance at happiness when she was murdered on the night of her wedding and now wants to be a good wife for Victor. She’s actually good looking, in a haunted way, with her large eyes and overweight lips, and only a few places where the skin has rotted away to show her bones. Long dresses would be a good fashion choice.

Ebert noted, “A piano is shown at one point in the movie, and we get just a glimpse of its nameplate. It's a Harryhausen. That would be Burton's tribute to Ray Harryhausen, the man who brought stop-motion animation to the level of artistry ("Jason and the Argonauts," "The Golden Voyage of Sinbad").” These days most animated movies are computer-generated, making flawlessly smooth pictures. Ebert said, “But in the days when they had to be laboriously drawn one frame at a time, it was scarcely more trouble to do table-top animation, building model figures and moving them a tiny bit between each frame.”

Famous creatures like King Kong were made somewhat by stop-frame animation, shot in a smaller scale before being mixed with live action in a visual printer so that Kong looked enormous. When you watch “King Kong,” you may see that his fur seems to inch or rise a little. You are looking at disturbances made by the creation of the animators between each shot. Ebert said, “My own feeling is that the artificiality of stop-action animation adds a quality that standard animation lacks, an eerie otherworldly magical quality that's hard to pin down. Certainly the macabre world of "Corpse Bride" benefits from it, and somehow it is appropriate that a skeleton would move with a subtle jerkiness.” The same old visual look added to the demand of Burton’s “The Nightmare Before Christmas.”

Meanwhile, in the place of the living, the innocent Victoria is about to be married off by her unfeeling parents to a Victorian villain with the Dickensian name Barkis Bittern, voiced by Richard E. Grant. She deserves better. In the end, it is not her fault that Victor accepted to an arranged marriage. Also, it is not Victor’s. Also, for this situation, it is not the Corpse Bride’s. Three young people are unhappy when two of them should be happy. It’s not fair, even if one of them is dead. Ebert said, “As he does in all of his pictures, Burton fills the frame with small grace touches and droll details. He seems to have a natural affinity for the Gothic, and his live-action "Legend of Sleepy Hollow" (also with Johnny Depp) remains one of the most visually beautiful films I've seen. He likes moonlight and dreary places, trees forming ominous shapes in the gloom, eyes peering uneasily into the incredible and love struggling to prevail in worlds of complex menace.” All of that is a lot for an animated fantasy to express, but “Corpse Bride” not only expresses it, but does it, yes, perfectly.

Ebert ended his review by noting, “The PG rating is about right, I think, although quite young or impressionable children may be scared by the skeletal characters. Everyone is relatively jolly, however, so maybe not.”

If you’re fan of the old Tim Burton, this is one you should definitely see. If you also liked “The Nightmare Before Christmas,” then “Corpse Bride” is one that you should not miss. You will absolutely love this movie because it’s a good one that seems to fit perfectly for Halloween.

Look out Friday to see what’s next for this year’s “Halloween Month.”