The Living End
The dead have all the fun in Burton's charmingly macabre 'Corpse Bride'

In this era of massive CGI effects blasting away at the viewers' nerves, Tim Burton goes back to the basics in Corpse Bride. Using old-fashioned, stop-motion puppet animation, Burton and co-director Mike Johnson fashion a charmingly rendered, and subversively droll fairy tale romance.

In a gloomy Victorian city, a marriage is arranged between Victoria (voice by Emily Watson), daughter of snooty, yet impoverished noble parents, and Victor (Johnny Depp), whose parents are wealthy, but common nouveau riche. Both Victor and Victoria are gentle, wide-eyed innocents relieved to discover they like each other on the wedding eve. But when nervous Victor flees the disastrous rehearsal and goes out into the woods to practice his vows, his "proposal" is accepted by a Corpse Bride (Helena Bonham Carter), on whose gnarled, branch-like finger he's placed his ring. Fetching in a tattered wedding gown and veil, dead flower bouquet, and blue skin (where the bones aren't showing through), it's love at first sight for the eerily seductive Bride, who drags Victor down to the raucous Land of the Dead.

There are elements of the Tam Lin fairy tale in the plot about a living mortal and his devoted betrothed trying to extricate him from the clutches of an otherworldly lover. But here the Bride is a poignant, sympathetic, and finally heroic figure; herself an innocent victim of cruel fate, she and Victor might have made a good match if she wasn't, well, dead. And Victor determines to do the honorable thing by her. Indeed, the love triangle is resolved not with a victory and a loss, but by all three characters behaving toward each other with honor and compassion.

Meanwhile, the dead party on in an underworld of vibrant candy colors, hot jazz (performed by scat-singing skeletons) and deliciously macabre humor (only Burton would make a singing sidekick out of a maggot who talks like Peter Lorre)—as opposed to the prim, proper, black-and-white Dickensian world of the living, "upstairs." Not only do the dead have all the fun, Burton takes the sting out of death itself, reminding us (in song, yet!) that "overrated" life is "just a temporary state, which everyone forgets until they meet their fate." When the dead move the party above ground, the pompous, ineffectual pastor (Christopher Lee) rails against the "demons from Hell." ("Keep it down, we're in a church!" one of the walking dead shushes him.) These dead are not portrayed as fearsome monsters, but merely the townsfolk's departed relatives.

Albert Finney and Joanna Lumley are quite funny voicing the girl's disdainful parents, draconian aristocrats in need of some cash. And the storybook Gothic imagery (recalling both Edward Gorey and Charles Addams) is delightful in every detail.

CORPSE BRIDE With the voices of Johnny Depp, Emily Watson, and Helena Bonham Carter. Written by John August and Caroline Thompson and Pamela Pettler. Directed by Mike Johnson and Tim Burton. A Warner Bros. release. (PG) 75 minutes. (***1/2)
Review published in Good Times, Sept. 29, 2005