Man, did I hate this movie.

Rating: 2/10 (3 March 2006)

In these times, 3-D animation has practically killed off 2-D. All-CGI movies flood the cinemas. But even the most realistic CGI just feels fake to me. Corpse Bride offers an alternativestop-motion animation, where hand-made puppets are photographed one frame at a time.
Corpse Bride centers on Victor (Depp), on the night before his arranged marriage to a woman named Victoria. After blowing the wedding rehearsal, Victor flies to the woods to practice by himself. He puts the ring on a twig, pretending it is Victoria's finger. The twig turns out to be the decaying finger of Emily, the corpse bride (Carter), a woman who waited until her death for her fiancée.
Thus, Victor accidentally marries Emily. The movie goes downhill from there, though it is boring from beginning to end. I did not give Corpse Bride this rating because I thought Nightmare was better, like I see many do. I gave the rating because the movie just plain sucks. Recently, Nightmare became popular with Hot Topic shoppers and others who only pretend their lives are miserable. Corpse Bride seems like an attempt to cash in on that demographic. Either that, or Tim Burton has forgotten how to make a movie without Gothic visuals, dark humor, and haunting music from Danny Elfman. Someone should tell Tim that he directed Pee-Wee's Big Adventure twenty years ago. Then, maybe he'll stop giving us garbage like Corpse Bride and Michael Jackson and the Chocolate Factory.
Pros: -At least Johnny Depp fakes a British accent well.
-Making a stop-motion animated film takes a while. Burton gets an A for effort.
Cons: -Corpse Bride has a pretty bad script. At different points, Victor seems to fall in love with both brides for no reason. And in another scene, Victor inexplicably climbs up a wall just like Spider-Man.
-The filmmakers fail to make Victor a protagonist I cared about, let alone like. In fact, I'll cover all the characters in this section. I saw nothing new. The filmmakers bothered not to flesh out the characters and make them interesting.
-Only one running gag uses the 3-D animation well, a corpse who often splits in half vertically. That one gag does not justify the use of these puppets. It all just feels like an attempt to cash in on Nightmare fans.
-Some guy sitting in front of me actually laughed at some of the other gags. I didn't laugh at all.
-The aforementioned Spider-Man scene also gives Danny Elfman an excuse to recycle his music from Spider-Man. Overall, Corpse Bride seemed to recycle music from Elfman's resumé.
-Same goes for the use of Nightmare's Gothic visuals. Same goes for this movie in general. Everyone just did it for the money.