Tim Burton's Corpse Bride: Review By Dan

Following up from my The Nightmare Before Christmas review, The Corpse Bride, I felt, was actually much more enjoyable. I don't know if it was because it's not as overrated, or that the animation looked markedly improved (doesn't hurt when you switch from a 35mm film camera to a special digital camera), or that I found the story more entertaining. I suppose a combination of all those things made Corpse Bride better to me.

In a mockery of a Victorian era of England, Corpse Bride is about the forced marriage between Johnny Depp's Victor and Emily Watson's Victoria. But, although its a forced marriage, they find that they are naturally attracted to each other anyways. As they try to go through with the wedding, Victor stumbles over his words repeatedly, and ends up ruining the ceremony for the time being. As he beats himself up over it walking through a forest (wait, this is sounding like it's taking a note from Nightmare before Christmas lol...), he practices his wedding vow, and manages to say it perfectly, placing his ring on a skeleton finger sticking out of the ground. This in turn somehow invokes the corpse to re-animate in the form of the Corpse Bride (Helena Bonham Carter, the queen of strange but awesome roles), and she declares that they are now married. From there the movie deals with Victor trying to worm his way out of that 'marriage', so that he can be with Victoria, with some great musical numbers involving the undead along the way.

Besides the clear rip of the protagonist having a life altering moment in a forest, akin to Nightmare, I found it to be extremely satisfying, one of Burton's best. I have hard time deciding which I like better, his live action or animation, as he does both superbly (well, minus that crapfest that was 'Planet of the Apes'... I still dunno how he managed to epically fail with that).

While the living side of the world is very dark and colorless, when Victor is in the underworld, the dead are lively, clever, and colorful to boot. I found that to be a nice contrast. I think my favorite scene of the movie had to be when Victor is given a present by the Corpse Bride, in the form of his dead dog, now a skeleton, and he tells it to play dead lol. Bad joke, but funny.

Again, not a fan of musicals, but the stop motion, outrageous and funny looking characters Tim Burton imagines makes me forgive a lot of traits I find annoying. Corpse Bride stands as one of my favorite animated movies.

I hope you've enjoyed my relatively short review of Tim Burton's stop motion movies :D