Just rent The Nightmare Before Chrismas

Rating: 3/10 (5 November 2005)

Tim Burton strikes out with this one.
The plot is unbelievably weak. A young man, son of the nouveau riche, is to marry a nobleman's daughter. He's very shy and though he's never met her, he likes her, and this makes him bumbling and nervous. While practicing his lines for the ceremony, he slips a ring on a corpse's finger and she comes to life and takes him to the world of the dead, where he is seemingly trapped.
The corpse bride herself is a character of so much personality that she totally destroys the plot. She's insane and is keeping the man from his true love... which would make her a good villain. She's also been wronged and is innocent and is attractive, which make her a good love interest. This is where things really get screwed up: the whole idea for a movie this careless with plot is to stick to a formula. Unfortunately, it's the formula these days to deviate from "the formula" so the whole love interest part of the story gets completely screwed up and makes you kind of hate the main character.
The songs are dull, obviously meant to stretch the movie to be an acceptable length.
But most of all, there's nothing very impressive about the visuals in the movie that wasn't vastly better in The Nightmare Before Christmas. The land of the dead, frankly, isn't that appealing. Everything moves way too much, it's jarring. And the only moments that really look good are ones that borrow directly from The Nightmare Before Christmas.
Don't bother. Tim Burton's successes have all had interesting and unusual stories with characters that made sense and that we could relate to, but not The Corpse Bride.