TIM BURTON'S CORPSE BRIDE

Director: Tim Burton(Edward Scissorhands, Batman, Beetlejuice, Ed Wood, Sleepy Hollow)
Starring: Voices of Johnny Depp, Emily Watson, Helena Bonham Carter, Tracy Ullman, Albert Finney)

First off please allow me to complain about the title of this film, would you? I don’t like having Tim Burton’s name in the freaking title. Get over yourself Timmy and sell some damn tickets without using a horrible title. Believe me, anyone who knows anything about Tim Burton and The Nightmare Before Christmas knows enough about this flick to decide whether to buy a ticket or not.

Whew. Sorry. I had a Bill O'Reilley/terrible twos moment there. I apologize.

Okay, now to the movie itself. I’ll begin by saying that I was a huge fan of The Nightmare Before Christmas. I thought it was an enormous success creatively, visually, stylistically and even musically. I loved Halloweentown and all the characters that lived in it. Alas, I love neither the drab no name town, nor the brighter and cheerier land of death in this similar claymation film. Burton has gone to these places before. Beetlejuice was pointedly about the exciting and fun afterlife, and I won’t bother to count the number of times he’s shown the everyday ho-hum world in a gray palette, whether figuratively or visually. There’s nothing wrong with these ideas. It’s a fine notion to paint the imagination of death as fantastical and alluring, but I don’t think that he did a particularly good job this time round.

Death, I say? Yes, that’s the fantasyland of this film. Johnny Depp is the voice of a sweet, soft, quiet boy matched by his parents for marriage to a sweet, soft, quiet girl with wicked parents. It’s a perfect match as a wedding, but alas, Johnny accidentally puts the wedding ring onto the outstretched finger of a corpse (while practicing his vows) and ends up betrothed to a dead woman. I won’t go into too many details here, although that is where the joy of this film lives, in the little singing black widows and the like.

The new couple head briefly to “Deadville”, or whatever the town of the dead is called. Of course, all must eventually be worked out. Johnny must find his living bride, and the corpse bride must get retribution from the baddie who killed her on her original wedding day. Fear not, they all do just that.

I have many complaints about the film, but I should note that it’s by no means an awful production. Much was fine, and parts did work. I simply found that for a number of reasons, the film didn’t come together anywhere nearly as well as The Nightmare Before Christmas. It’s disappointing to me as I think this film could have been quite good. I won’t go into too much depth on the problems except to say that the music, acting and script were rather weak. I feel that each of these had the roots to be quite good, but that nothing grew out of it. The music was usually quite mundane, the script felt very rushed to me, and I rarely felt that the characters ever got “fleshed out” so to speak, whether they were living or dead. I liked the job Emily Watson and Helena Carter did, but I don’t think the script gave them much of a chance to really create characters. To probably mangle a phrase I attribute to Robert Evans, “If it’s not on the page, it won’t be on the screen”.

This was an average film that at its heart was quite creative, and could have been much more. A disappointment.

Standouts: Aspects of the art design and visuals were interesting, and at its heart this was a very creative story.
Blowouts: Script, music and some acting was “thin”.

Grade: C+

12/14/2005