“Corpse Bride,” Tim Burton’s latest foray into stop-motion animation, is filled with holes that leave the audience wishing Burton had just left the dead at peace.
Although “Bride” has the same imaginative animation as “The Nightmare Before Christmas,” the story is nowhere near as captivating.
Victor, voiced by Johnny Depp, is an awkward outcast who by the fate of the fish market is arranged to marry Victoria (Emily Watson), the stereotype of the girl next door. In a twist of events Victor ends up proposing to a corpse, played brilliantly by Helena Bonham Carter. Victor is then sucked into the world of the dead, a colorful city below the real world, where he spends his time trying to return to the land of the living so that he can be with Victoria.
Amidst all the plot confusion there are several songs slipped in which pale in comparison to those in “Nightmare.” These seem to act only as a decoy to distract the audience from the pain of a poorly written script.
One thing that seems odd is that the world of the dead is so much more energetic then that of the living. Considering this, the corpse bride is a much better catch then Victoria. Victoria is boring and soft-spoken, while the corpse bride is gorgeous and vivacious. The drawback is that she is dead, which does not seem to matter much since she is pretty well intact. Why would Victor want to go back to Victoria? Why would he want to go back to the dark and drab world above? As Elder Gutknecht (Michael Gough) says in reference to the dead metropolis, “People are dying to get down here.”
It is sad when a screenwriter loses control of the audience’s empathy. It is obvious that we should want the two lovers to be together, but the characters are never developed which makes it difficult for us to feel for Victoria.
After leaving the theater, your first question will be, “How was a film with such a horribly developed story ever made?” It does not hurt to get Tim Burton to write his name in big letters above it and take responsibility for it being rancid.
If you have already spent the money to see this film, then you have learned a valuable lesson: there is so little creativity in the world that anything in clay will make it in this industry (for example, “Chicken Run”). Therefore, go buy some clay and let the animation begin. Who knows? You may make something better than “Corpse Bride.” For those of you who are smart, save the $10 and rent “The Nightmare Before Christmas” instead.
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