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Corpse Bride September 25, 2005 |
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There are few director-star-composer trios in film history as prolific and perfectly matched as Tim Burton, Johnny Depp, and Danny Elfman. Some come to mind, like Fellini, Mastroianni, and Nino Rota, or Hitchcock, James Stewart, and Bernard Herrmann, but the string of consistently unique and entertaining pictures Burton has made with Depp as the lead, and Elfman setting the mood with his eerie scores, is quite remarkable. If you look at the canon, from “Edward Scissorhands” and “Ed Wood”, up to this summer’s big hit “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” and the new “Corpse Bride”, a marvelously funny goth romance painstakingly filmed using stop motion animation, there is hardly a dud in the batch (“Sleepy Hollow” is close though), proving that when a creative team is as comfortable with each other as these three are, the results are seamless and often inspired. ‘Charlie’ was more of an homage to its source literary material, as well as a splashy and darker remake of an old movie, but with “Corpse Bride”, Burton is back to his original macabre best, with a tale of otherworldly love and deception, promise and duty, marriage and goblins, filled to the brim with odd characters, strange designs, rhyming tunes (courtesy of Elfman), spooky atmosphere, and of course corpses, lots of them, walking, talking, singing, dancing, jolly old corpses that belong less in a scary zombie movie, and more in a light horror like this- a funny and sometimes sweet dark musical comedy with heart, soul, and bones to spare. Leading up to Halloween we’ll soon be inundated with one lame horror film after another, and none of them will be as visually arresting, smart, and creepy the characters, both living and dead, in this one-of-a-kind animated picture from our premier gothic auteur and his talented collaborators. The movie takes place in late 18th century London, where the newly rich fishing empire Van Dort family are about to marry of their shy, skinny son Victor (Depp) to the only daughter, Victoria (Emily Watson), of the snobbish, newly poor Everglot family. Victor is terrified of the arranged marriage, but his fears are put to rest when he lays eyes on Victoria and falls instantly in love, in a sweet scene at the family piano that is played back later on in a similarly romantic scene between Victor and his soon-to-be corpse bride, when the confusion of the film’s two worlds (the underworld of the dead, and the London of the living) gives way to character development and surprisingly touching emotional resonance. After badly botching the wedding rehearsal, Victor goes off into the woods to better learn his vows, and while practicing the words on a twig, he accidentally brings to life the bones of a dead, jilted bride (Helena Bonham Carter), who has it in her that Victor is now her husband, till death do them, or more specifically, him part. What ensues is a spirited romantic comedy as Victor desperately tries to get back to Victoria, but finds himself accepting the Corpse Bride and her sad tale of wedding night deceit, and becomes torn as to what is the right ting to do; find Victoria and live happily, or become of the dead, and live up to his accidental vows to the bride. The decision, at once seemingly easy, is decidedly difficult given Victor’s fondness for both women, and his demeanor as a gentleman, the only truly good man in this grungy, foggy London story. Burton’s film, co-directed by stop motion animator Mike Johnson, is amazing to look at, with characters whose designs are slightly skewed versions of stock human forms, fat and skinny, huge and pointy chinned, with bellowing voices prone to break into rhythm at any given moment. In a way, the bopping, structurally unsound characters are reminiscent of the character designs in the French animated comedy “The Triplets of Belleville”, but where that film used the bizarre designs as satire on genre types, the characters here are simply authentic humans trapped in contorted clay molds. Elfman’s music is catchy and moody as usual, opening with a two-family number about the need for the wedding to work, a skeleton dance number (with Elfman giving voice to a character named “Bonesjangles”) that seems inspired by the psychedelic “Pink Elephants” number from “Dumbo”, and the Corpse Bride’s melodramatic solo after Victor’s initial rejection, is perfectly weepy. “I know that I am dead,” she sings, “but it seems that I still have some tears to shed.” That kind of pathos balances well with the offbeat human characters, including Albert Finney as the greedy, pumpkin-shaped Mr. Everglot, and the comedy of the underworld characters, with a wise-cracking maggot living in the bride’s eye socket that sounds uncannily like a Peter Lorre impersonator, and the songs move the plot along breezily, unlike in ‘Charlie’, where the strange Oompa Loompa numbers were out of place and forced. In comparison, “Corpse Bride” draws closest to “Beetlejuice” for its wacky characters and interplay between the living and the dead, and obviously to “The Nightmare Before Christmas” for its beautiful, incredibly difficult perfection of an animated format hardly practiced anymore, but on its own, it can stand as a true original, and one of the best from a talented group of craftsmen. “Corpse Bride” is playing at the Movie-Plex 59. by Adam Suraf
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