We All End Up The Remains Of The Day

Rating: 7/10 (15 January 2010)

Victor Van Dort is a young man with many problems. He is arranged to be married to Victoria Everglot, whom he has never met. Then he accidentally manages to get married to Emily, who unfortunately is dead. Then to complicate things he falls in love with Victoria, but feels bound to honour his commitment to Emily. What's a poor guy to do ?
This beautiful stop-motion animation film is yet another macabre delight from the fertile imagination of Tim Burton featuring the utterly charming music of Danny Elfman. Like its twelve-years-older companion piece The Nightmare Before Christmas, it weaves an astonishingly rich and beautiful fairy-tale world out of paper and ink, silicone and paint, shadows and spirals. The detail of the drawings and the elegant motion of the camera are sublime, while the music swells through every scene; gentle piano rolls one minute, foot-stomping jazz trombones the next. The central song in The Land Of The Dead, the amusingly named Remains Of The Day, is sung by a deliriously lively skeleton called Bonejangles (Elfman) and is one of the best musical numbers in years. What I love so much about Burton's material is his ability to create these crazy stories with wild potential for creative mayhem, but at the same time write characters we really care about. When Victor initially rejects Emily, she is simply heartbroken and her reaction is both comic and beautifully tender ("I know that I am dead; yet it seems that I still have some tears to shed."). The top-notch voice cast shout and sing with great abandon, and everyone is terrific, whether it be Depp's mild-mannered fop, Horrocks' good-natured six-eyed spider, Grant's deliciously slimy heel or Lee's gruff parson. Burton has amassed a fabulous Stock Theatre of regular players (Depp, Bonham Carter, Lee, Finney, Roy, Whitehouse, Gough) and they clearly love working with him. Dedicated to the late Joe Ranft, the Pixar animator, this is a beautifully creepy little happy fable, with a lovely atmosphere and wonderful music from start to finish.