09/26/2005 Entry: "Corpse Bride"

Good enough for the kindergartener, a bit lacking for her dad.

The technical execution of the animation is very polished, much more than in The Nightmare Before Christmas and James and the Giant Peach. There is a lot of smooth walking animation and some excelent characterisation via movement. The facial animation is light years ahead of Nightmare. There are a couple of "horror" scenes that are done very well. There is some damn good lighting work in this film too, I'm not kidding. There is a "tradition" (does three films a tradition make?) for there to be one "fantastic" number in these movies. In this one it comes near the beginning, as a skeletal band relates the story of the death of Emily, the Corpse Bride. It is underplayed, as is most of the movie, relying on colored lighting rather than the ultraviolet effects used in Nightmare and Peach. It is a much more subtle effect and much better suited to this film than the other technique would have been.

The cast all does very well. Helena Bonham Carter gets to run the fair gamut of emotion, and sings! Christopher Lee plays ... Christopher Lee, but that's why we love him. The maggot, voiced in a Peter Lorre-esque manner is an excellent comedic touch. Johnny Depp does a fine job as well.

There are some really good scenes. As I mentioned, the two or three "horror" scenes were really good. The scene where Victor makes up with Emily at the piano after trying to flee his accidental marriage demonstrates a subtelty of expression I really didn't expect to see coming from metal-and-silicone puppets.

The atmosphere is what one would expect from such a movie. I am fairly certain that one character (a small boy) is ripped directly from an Edwad Gorey illustation. There is a clever shout out to Ray Harryhausen that made me smile.

But...

The music for this one, particulary the songs, seem a bit phoned-in. Maybe Danny Elfman needs to cut his schedule back a bit so that he has time to write more than three lines of lyrics for a song in a semi-musical film, or maybe the story and characters weren't interesting enough to support much more.

The story sems a bit muddled. At times it seems like it wants to go places that it never ends up going. Granted, the medium does not lend itself to lengthy movies do to time and production cost constraints, but the film manages to feel much shorter than The Nightmare before Christmas, despite running 10 minutes longer. There is too much time spent elaborating on the personalities of relatively minor characters when one of the key benefits of animation is the ability to portray such information visually. As such, much of the time spent on Victor and Victoria's parents is time wasted, IMO. Those characters weren't unique enough for the extra time spent with them to be fun.

There is a lot of time spent on Victor's internal state, but Victoria is essentially just a pretty face and a shy smile. The Emily storyline and the world of the dead is where most of the investment in time and creativity was spent, to the unending joy, no doubt, of Hot Topic's accountants :D