a Tim Burton charmer

Rating: 8/10 (24 September 2006)

Much like his "Nightmare Before Christmas," "Tim Burton's Corpse Bride" uses state-of-the-art, stop-motion animation to tell a cheerily morbid story - this one showcasing bodies in various stages of decomposition larking it up in a musical comedy underworld. Think of it as a role-reversal version of the myth about the god Hades and his reluctant bride Persephone, kidnapped from the land of the living.
Victor is a painfully shy and awkward young man who is about to enter into an arranged marriage with an equally shy young woman, coincidentally named Victoria (even more "coincidentally," the movie takes place in the Victorian Era). However, on the eve of the wedding, Victor finds himself "married" to a dead woman whose frozen corpse he stumbles upon in a nearby forest. Victor is immediately whisked away to the Land of the Dead, where skeletons sing and dance, and where maggots and black widow spiders offer words of advice for the benighted newlywed couple. Much of the story involves Victor's desperate attempts to flee the scene and Victoria's concomitant efforts to bring him back to the land of the living.
The talented animators have had a bit of ironic fun with the visual palette, bathing the scenes set in the real world in a ghostly-blue pallor, while bringing the Land of the Dead to life with vibrant, splashy colors. In both foreground and background, the animation has a clean, uncluttered look, with the exaggerated, severely angular features of the characters providing amusing commentary on their personalities. The dialogue is clever, sharp and witty, and the musical numbers have a buoyancy and bounce to them that help keep the morbid subject matter palatable for all but the very youngest audience members. The film is also blessed with fine voice-over work from the likes of Johnny Depp, Helena Bonham Carter, Emily Watson, Tracey Ullman, Albert Finney, and horror movie veteran Christopher Lee.
"Corpse Bride" is a relaxing, unfrenetic treat for those on all points of the life/death continuum.