"Corpse Bride" Dead on Arrival: I'm Sorry, but I Will Not Eat Tim Burton's Sh*t.

Rating: 3/10 (24 March 2007)

To Hell with Tim Burton. To Hell with him and his Gothic garbage. It's old, it's tired, and I, for one, am sick of it.
These were the thoughts coursing through my head after watching Tim Burton's "The Corpse Bride." Now, please understand that I like Tim Burton - I admire his unique visual style, loving "Pee-Wee's Big Adventure," "Ed Wood," "Batman" and "Batman Returns," "Sleepy Hollow," "Big Fish," "Mars Attacks!" (quite underrated, I believe), "Edward Scissorhands," and "Beetle Juice," but unlike all those Hot Topic idiots out there, I won't enjoy a film just because he had a hand in it.
I found that "Corpse Bride" featured wonderful animation and great voice casting...and, well, that's about it. Even the music, once again by Burton-favorite Danny Elfman, was hardly worthwhile. The movie had four songs in it, and only one was actually worth listening to ("Remains of the Day"?). I believe the great composer is capable of much more, though it's hard to tell because the production quality of the songs in this and "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory" was awful - the vocals in the songs was drowned out significantly by the music, rendering the words almost indecipherable.
The movie had a pincushion of a plot, hardly flowing at all. Victor (Johnny Depp) jumped from Victoria (Emily Watson) to Emily, the film's title character (Helena Bonham Carter) and back again so many times in the 77 minute-long film, it was almost laughable by the end.
It was almost as if the writers gave the animators a draft of the script, and then when it came time to finish, the animators asked for the final draft, and the writers collectively shrugged, saying, "Eh, no one will notice." (Granted, perhaps the humorously short runtime was the only real saving grace of this "film"...still, 77 minutes is still painfully long for a bad joke.)
Oh, and the end: utterly ridiculous and completely nonsensical; it wasn't "magical"...it was just plain bad writing. This God-awful attempt at a fairytale-like ending made me question just when "rebelling against Hollywood" became synonymous with bad movie-making.
While I do enjoy most Tim Burton's films, he is definitely not the omnipotent film-making powerhouse Hot Topic wants me to believe he is, wowing everyone with each and every movie he helps to create; he can cure cancer for all I care, but I will still never forgive him for "Planet of the Apes."