Tragic Waste Of A Beautiful Opportunity

Rating: 4/10 (24 September 2005)

Let me give you a metaphor: You rub the lamp, and a djinn appears, huge and fearsome with the dust of the desert swirling in his breath. He says to you, "Master, the doors of all the Thousand Worlds are open to you, and all that is within them is yours. Go where you please, do as you wish, for not even Death Himself shall bar your way." And you answer, "Could you take me to the post office? I've got some bills to send." The Corpse Bride uses amazing technology and stunning visual mastery to do... nothing in particular. There's a lot of dialogue scenes. Beautiful, luminous, finely crafted puppets sit around in the living room and talk. This would be stupid even if they were capable of changing their facial expressions.
The sets all feel like they're about five feet square. Every scene happens in a tiny little box. Other stop-motion features--Wallace and Gromit shorts, The Nightmare Before Christmas--haven't had a problem creating the appearance of scale. This one does, and I don't think it's a technical problem. I think it's a creative one.
I'm not even sure why this film is a stop-motion feature at all. It doesn't need to be. The Nightmare Before Christmas pulled and stretched at reality with the bizarre things its characters were and did. The Clown With the Tear-Away Face! The Harlequin Demon whose mouth goes all around! The Two-Faced Mayor! Except for one overused joke with a man who splits in half, there's none of that in The Corpse Bride.
Tim Burton and his team have completely failed to take advantage of the medium. I mean, that's why you turn to animation in the first place: to play with all the things that can't happen in our reality. They could have crafted anything! They could have put them anywhere! And all they did was create a bunch of pale people sitting around fretting.
What a waste of a Thousand Worlds.