an enchantment at all levels

Rating: 9/10 (18 February 2007)

The year 2005 was excellent for Tim Burton. A few months after he filled us with joy with his stylish rendering of Roald Dahl's novel "Charlie and the chocolate factory", he extended the pleasure with this stop motion picture whose only fault is to be too much short. However, it's a feast for the eye and the mind.
Sourced from an old legend according to which a young man accidentally has to marry a corpse bride (one recognizes Burton's inclination for myths and legends), "Corpse Bride" bears the trademark of its auteur, beginning with the backdrop and the scenery. A dreary, gray depiction of London tangled in Victorian values and bribery at the end of the nineteenth Century sharply contrasts with a bright, brisk representation of the great beyond animated with colorful, eccentric skeletons, living dead. Hell isn't a bad place to be, at least for th famous corpse bride who wishes to live forever with Victor. But the latter can't accept this and is determined at all costs to marry Victoria. Alas! Because they believe Victor dead, they want her to marry an unscrupulous rich man. The story is rather linear but filled with effective visual ideas, genteel humor and an indispensable dose of emotion (I must profess that I was moved when Victor was offered his cute little skeleton dog as a wedding present). And Tim Burton once said that monsters weren't so scary and felt lonely and sad. It's what we could put forward with the corpse bride who only wants to be happy through wedding.
This film could be "Beetlejuice"'s son because of the manner Tim Burton represents us death. I will just regret an end made with alacrity. But for the rest: sit and savor one more extra canonical work from an auteur.