From 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
Review
Tim Burton's Corpse Bride is essentially a reunion of every actor, composer, or animator the director has ever worked with. This is good news if you're a Burton fan, not such good news if his familiar milieu has worn thin. Those entranced by Burton's gothic stylings will find Corpse Bride resembling an obvious source of inspiration, the drawings of Edward Gorey, perhaps more than anything Burton has filmed. The blue-tinted, chiaroscuro world of the living is practically an homage to Gorey's work, full of jagged angles, caricatures ranging from gaunt to rotund, and gnarled, haunting beauty. It's when Burton goes downstairs to the world of the dead that Corpse Bride begins feeling like a lazy rehash of his own work. This full-color revue of singing skeletons is his third such visitation to a land of campy undead, following Beetlejuice and The Nightmare Before Christmas. The cheekily grotesque whimsy of these characters, with their removable body parts and PG-rated gore, felt fresh in those films, but here it just seems perfunctory and warmed over. Danny Elfman's lyrics and songs have also lost their charm to the point of anonymity, and his score, complete with its standard complement of ethereal choral voices, is as much a tired self-allusion as anything Burton's guilty of. Perhaps if the plot were sturdier, these elements wouldn't be so noticeable. Some obvious reservations aside, Corpse Bride is overall a winning achievement, as Burton's collaborators mostly continue to excel at what they do. The vocal talent is evocative, notably Helena Bonham Carter (Burton's "collaborator" in more than one way) as the forlorn corpse bride herself. It's just that such great things are expected of Burton as a visual trailblazer, it can't help but be disappointing when he doesn't go very far off the path. ~ Derek Armstrong, All Movie Guide
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