The Corpse Bride

Debbi and I had a 'date night' tonight: She cooked dinner (mmm, lemon asparagus chicken), and then we went to see the Tim Burton animated film The Corpse Bride.

I'm a lukewarm Tim Burton fan: I loved Ed Wood, disliked Batman and Batman Returns, enjoyed Sleepy Hollow (the fact that I think Johnny Depp is maybe the best actor of his generation and Christina Ricci one of the most beautiful women in Hollywood may have something to do with that), and got some yuks from Beetlejuice. And I did enjoy The Nightmare Before Christmas, although I didn't go ga-ga over it like some did.

So I expected The Corpse Bride to be a sort of darker, less manic kin to the likewise-animated Nightmare, and I was pretty much spot-on with that.

The film's story is simple: In a town in the unspecified past - presumably in England - Victor Van Dort (voice of Johnny Depp) is engaged to be married to Victoria Everglot (Emily Watson). His family is eager to have the old-money prestige of the Everglots, while her nearly-broke parents want to have her dowry from his new-money family to refill their coffers. Victor falls in love with Victoria at first sight, but is so nervous he can't handle the wedding rehearsal, and runs off into the woods. Inspired, he manages to recite his vows, thrusting the ring onto what looks like a branch, but is actually the finger of the Corpse Bride (Helena Bonham Carter), a young woman who was betrayed and killed by her lover, and whose spirit restlessly seeks her true love.

The Bride takes Victor to the land of the dead, convinced that they are now married. Victor struggles to return to the land of the living, while the Everglots - sure Victor has abandoned Victoria - scheme to marry her off to the wedding crasher, Barkis Bittern (Richard E. Grant).

Filmed in stop-motion animation using sophisticated marionettes, Corpse Bride is certainly a technical triumph, as everything is staged so perfectly the only real hint that it's stop-motion is the relatively sparse backdrops. But the colors are delightful, the visual designs imaginative, the movements distinctive and fluid, and it passes the most important test - after a while you forget that it's any "special" kind of animation, and you just watch and enjoy the film.

The other impressive thing is the cast, which would be a pretty boffo line-up for any live-action film: Besides Depp, the cast includes comedienne Tracy Ullman, Joanna Lumley (from The New Avengers and Absolutely Fabulous), Albert Finney, Christopher Lee (Saruman!), and Michael Gough (Alfred from Burton's Batman films). What a great cast! Of course, as is usually the case for a Burton film, we're also stuck with Danny Elfman's music, although as Corpse Bride is a half-musical, Elfman gets to pull back from his dreary, tedious incidental music and cut loose by writing some show tunes.

The story works fairly well, perhaps milking the story for a little more than it had in it, although a couple of good twists near the end keep it from getting dull. (I did see the big plot twist coming very early on, though.) I think the story's biggest flaw is that at the end it decides that it's really the Bride's story, when really it's been Victor's from the very beginning, and that undercuts the drama and triumph of the climax.

But it's not a huge flaw, because when you come down to it, The Corpse Bride is really just a very well-crafted bit of entertainment. IT's got the air of an old fairy tale, wrapped up as a matinee movie. So sit back and enjoy; it's not a classic, but it's fun.