An Atmospheric Parody of Tim Burton's Most Detailed Perceptions of People and Things

Rating: 7/10 (10 September 2007)

Tim Burton's films are cultivated by the same halfway goth preteens that melt over Johnny Depp, and the feeling of the multiplex theater crowded with them on a late Friday or Saturday night with your own dynamic yet passive group of friends is felt through Corpse Bride even while one sits at home and watches it on a DVD rented from the public library. If Burton has fallen off in recent years with Sleepy Hollow, Planet of the Apes, and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, you must admit that there is still an atmosphere such as the one above mentioned in his more recent and continuing films. Whatever he does to carve and style his work for each generation's wave of odd but commercially compelling target audience is a great talent for subtlety.
While it isn't something very special that will stay with me much later, Corpse Bride is a film of Burton's I've truly liked after awhile not having made movies on the same wavelength as Ed Wood, which I adore. In Corpse Bride, the virtuously atmospheric clay animation is the outcome of Burton's very specific, meticulous, and imaginatively analytical ideas and artistic demands. The animation is able to depict parodies of his most detailed perceptions of people and things, and the clay element gives the film a very Gothic look which is his trademark. I was also surprised by the wonderful impact of the emotional finale.