Tim Burton's Corpse Bride
From AwardAnnals
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| Director(s) | Mike Johnson, Tim Burton |
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| Distributor | Warner Home Video |
| Honors | |
| Set in a 19th century European village, this stop-motion, animated feature follows the story of Victor (voiced by Johnny Depp), a young man who is whisked away to the underworld and wed to a mysterious Corpse Bride, while his real bride, Victoria, waits bereft in the land of the living. Though life in the Land of the Dead proves to be a lot more colorful than his strict Victorian upbringing, Victor learns that there is nothing in this world, or the next, that can keep him away from his one true love. | |
Set in a 19th century European village, this stop-motion, animated feature follows the story of Victor (voiced by Johnny Depp), a young man who is whisked away to the underworld and wed to a mysterious Corpse Bride, while his real bride, Victoria, waits bereft in the land of the living. Though life in the Land of the Dead proves to be a lot more colorful than his strict Victorian upbringing, Victor learns that there is nothing in this world, or the next, that can keep him away from his one true love.
Honors
Reviews
Amazon.com
Who else but Tim Burton could make Corpse Bride, a necrophiliac’s delight that’s fun for the whole family? Returning to the richly imaginative realm of stop-motion animation (after previous successes with The Nightmare Before Christmas and James and the Giant Peach), Burton, with codirector Mike Johnson, invites us to visit the dour, ashen, and drearily Victorian mansions of the living, where young Victor Van Dort (voiced by Johnny Depp) is bequeathed to wed the lovely Victoria (Emily Watson). But the wedding rehearsal goes sour and, in the kind of Goth-eerie forest that only exists in Burton-land, Victor suddenly finds himself accidentally married to the Corpse Bride (Helena Bonham Carter), a blue-tinted, half-skeletal beauty (how pleasantly full-bosomed she remains!) with a loquacious maggot installed behind one prone-to-popping eyeball. This being a Burton creation, the underworld of the dead is a lively and colorful place indeed, and Danny Elfman’s songs and score make it even livelier, presenting Victor with quite a dilemma: Should he return above-ground to Victoria, or remain devoted to his corpse bride? At a brisk 76 minutes, Burton’s graveyard whimsy (loosely based on a 19th century Russian folktale) never wears out its welcome, and the voice casting (which includes Tracey Ullman and Albert Finney) is superbly matched the film’s gloriously amusing character design, guaranteed to yield a wealth of gruesome toys and action figures for many Halloweens to come. —Jeff Shannon
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Related works
The Corpse Bride: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack
Did composer Danny Elfman have enough juice for two movies by Tim Burton in a single year? His first 2005 outing, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, is one of his all-time best, and the songs he wrote for each of that film’s children are marvels of satirical invention. A few months later, both Burton and Elfman are back with The Corpse Bride, a stop-motion animated film in the vein of The Nightmare Before Christmas. This time it feels as if Elfman may have overextended himself. The composer has fun with Gothic atmospherics, (when in doubt,…
