Night of the Moping Dead

Rating: 3/10 (9 April 2008)

Stop-motion animation is a rarely used medium these days, but one has to admit -- when it's done, it's usually done very well. 'Corpse Bride' is a great example of this; every visual in the movie exhibits beautiful style and craftsmanship. It's a shame they had to waste all this eye candy on a script which is so thin and lifeless (like a corpse bride, har har). The premise is interesting, at least -- a nebbish groom winds up accidentally "marrying" a zombie -- but all of the interesting possibilities of the premise are ignored, as the plot mostly adheres to overdone kid's movie conventions. There's a bad guy, and cutesy little supporting characters, and parents that just don't get it, and everything else you expect to find (and are disappointed to find) in this type of film. Mostly these conventions just distract from the love triangle that is central to the movie, and which is never developed as fully as it should have been.
'Corpse Bride' is also a musical, but you'll wish it wasn't. Generally musicals feature a wide range of emotions in their songs, and since this is a bittersweet love story, you would expect that to be the case here. Not so! It seems that few of the characters are able to lift themselves out of their self-pitying depression for even a few bars of any song. It's probably the worst score I've ever heard for Danny Elfman; just one drab, interminable tune after another.
I'll probably watch this movie again, simply because the animation was that good. Next time, however, I'm muting the sound and turning some other music on.