Overall Rating
 Awesome: 41.13%
Worth A Look: 37.1%
Average: 14.52%
Pretty Bad: 6.45%
Total Crap: 0.81%
12 reviews, 52 user ratings
|
|
| Corpse Bride |
by Doug Bentin
"Melancholy? Romantic? Gothic? All that and more."
|
If you’re anywhere near my age, Heaven help you, you may remember with some degree of nostalgia when people used to refer to “the magic of the movies.” Well, it isn’t magic anymore because we understand technology and the way it is used in the filmmaking process. DVD bonus features are nice, but they can remove the sense of awe we used to feel when dinosaurs ruled the earth.Since I was dragged into adulthood I’ve seen only two movies that delivered that childlike awesomeness (Cocteau’s “Beauty and the Beast” and The Royal Ballet’s “Tales of Beatrix Potter”). There are moments in “Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride” that come close, but ultimately it falls just short.
Using a technologically advanced variation on stop-motion animation, Burton has adapted a Jewish folk tale about a man runs away from his own wedding rehearsal after he messes everything up through a combination of innate klutziness and pre-wedding jitters. As he runs the lines of his vows through his head, he practices slipping the ring on his intended, only to find out that what he thought was a stick poking up from the ground is a skeletal finger and he has now plighted his troth to the corpse of a young woman who was murdered by her fiancée and left dead in the forest.
Emily, the corpse bride, returns with Victor to the land of the living, which is drab, boring, and colorless. There she meets Victoria, the “breather” Victor is supposed to marry. Furious with her new husband, she carries him back to the land of the dead where they are told by Elder Gutknecht that if Victor takes his own life during a wedding ceremony in the land of the living, he and Emily will be joined forever.
There are complications with another suitor for Victoria’s hand, but the narrative is uncluttered by extraneous subplots—the film runs a brief 76 minutes—only breaking for a few unmemorable songs by Danny Elfman. While Elfman’s music was a necessary part of Burton’s earlier “The Nightmare Before Christmas,” here it seems more like it was welded on because animated films always include songs. They’re not painful, but they don’t add anything a minute or two of exposition wouldn’t have taken care of.
Johnny Depp voices Victor, a one-dimensional character that didn’t need someone of Depp’s talent. Ditto Emily Watson as Victoria, Joanna Lumley and Albert Finney as her parents, Tracey Ullman, Michael Gough, Christopher Lee, and Jane Horrocks.
It’s really a one-actor show and Helena Bonham Carter, in the title role, is brilliant. Emily is by turns coy, aggressive, angry, vengeful, shy, and always very much in love. Burton has certainly brought out the best in her by allowing her to let her hair down and leave off the bustles that used to follow her around in every role. Plus, Emily is very attractive, in a necrophilic kind of way.
Ah yes, necrophilia. Much has been made already of Emily’s sexiness, but it’s more than just a large, albeit blue and bloodless, bosom. And it’s really more than just the more colorful, livelier city of the dead. Emily represents the odd choice, the one we seldom make because it’s so much safer to do what everyone else does. Who would choose the dead over the living? Well, Tim Burton, for one.
There would be something tragic in Victor’s decision to wed Victoria instead of Emily if Victor were anything but a standard issue bourgeois. He can’t make an out of the ordinary choice because he’s too ordinary. It’s interesting that Emily thinks she fancies him and his boring life topside because it’s something she once aspired to herself.
There isn’t any joy in Victor and Victoria finding each other. They’re like Benjamin and Elaine at the end of “The Graduate,” together at last at the back of a bus, linked by what they think is love but with nothing to say to each other. The Corpse Bride’s joy is her final transcendence of the human, living or dead.
The film contains a few moments that might frighten the very youngest children, but as Burton so often does, he uses the spookshow iconography to invoke and then make fun of the things that used to give us that shiver of a childhood chill.The movie isn’t quite magical, but it comes so close it reminds you of what movie magic used to be.
link directly to this review at https://www.efilmcritic.com/review.php?movie=12831&reviewer=405
originally posted: 10/08/05 01:32:20
![[printer]](/images/icon/printer.gif) printer-friendly format
|
OFFICIAL SELECTION: 2005 Toronto Film Festival For more in the 2005 Toronto Film Festival series, click here.
|
 |
USA
16-Sep-2005 (PG)
DVD: 31-Jan-2006
UK
N/A
Australia
17-Nov-2005
|
|
Articles 
subscribe to this feed![[AllPosters.com]](/images/icon/ap.gif){kind=icon}
