‘Corpse Bride’ Has A Sweet Story Behind Its Macabre Title

Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride, the newest offering (and one with a gleefully, wickedly macabre title) from the famously off-kilter director, is currently one of the top five most popular films in the country. Although this stop-motion animated film (made in the same style as The Nightmare Before Christmas) might seem to be perfectly timed for the fall season and the upcoming Halloween celebrations, don’t let its dark exterior and morbid name fool you. Underneath the gothic trappings of Corpse Bride lies a tale whose heart is as sweet as the candy corn so commonly consumed at this time of year.

Set in a vaguely Eastern European town sometime in the 19th Century, Corpse Bride follows Victor Van Dort (voiced by eccentric leading man Johnny Depp, who teams with Burton for the fifth time), a gentle soul who finds himself betrothed to a woman he’s never met.

The match is set up by his nouveau-riche, crass fishmonger parents, Nell and William Van Dort (Tracey Ullman and Paul Whitehouse), and snobbish Maudeline and Finnis Everglot (Joanna Lumley and Albert Finney), the aristocratic couple whose name and status they covet. Nervous as a shaking leaf, Victor is pleasantly surprised to find that his intended is the winsome, equally shy Victoria (Emily Watson), who also takes a shine to the potential coupling.  

However, as the soon-to-be bride and groom rehearse their vows before the daunting Pastor Galswells (a boomingly imposing Christopher Lee) and the duo’s increasingly impatient parents, Victor becomes flustered and is forced to retreat in order to study his vows. While practicing in the nearby woods, he slides the ring on what looks to be a dead tree branch but inadvertently places it on what turns out to be the finger of the deceased Emily (Helena Bonham Carter), a woman who was murdered just before her wedding night and is now thrilled to finally be able to have a husband to call her own. The excited corpse bride drags Victor to the underground land of the unliving, and the timid young man finds that he must make a difficult choice between keeping his undead wife or finding a way back to his living fiancée.

Corpse Bride, which is co-directed by Burton and animator Mike Johnson (making his feature debut), is a beautifully shot film.  Much less expensive than CGI or artist-drawn animation ($30 to $40 million as opposed to $80 to $100 million), the stop-motion style (which involves photographing 12- to 18-inch-tall puppets, frame by frame, at incremental movements) requires almost infinite patience but the rewards can be great.

Here, combined with the effective voice characterizations, it creates superb, dazzling, wonderfully-realized 3-D imagery to complement the simple but engaging story. The triangle of Victor, Emily and Victoria becomes an effectively appealing one visually, and then the screenwriters (which include Caroline Thompson, who helped give emotional heft to Burton’s Edward Scissorhands, and John August, who has assisted Burton in his last three films) were keenly sharp in making each of the three a sympathetic figure instead of trying to set our loyalties against one or the other.  

It should also be noted that the film has a very sly sense of humor, from its clever asides (including a tribute to one of the great masters of stop-motion animation, seen when Victor sits down to play the piano at the Everglot house) to its witty approach of making the underground land of the dead a very colorful, lively setting while the above ground lair of the living is a grey, gloomy muddle of a place (complete with mainly cold, heartless cynics and overly pragmatic opportunists).

There are even a few silly, but forgivable elements, such as Emily’s smart aleck little maggot pal who sounds an awful lot like Peter Lorre. But it all comes together to form one of Burton’s more soulful, likable (but still slightly weird) films.

Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride is rated PG for some scary images and action, and brief mild language.