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Underground > Film, TV & Theatre >

Corpse Bride

  
 
Perfect Tommy
00:32 / 22.01.05
I can't help it—having imprinted on the Tim Burton aesthetic as a youngin', I was terribly excited to see that there's a new Nightmare Before Christmas-style movie due in September 2005. Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter provide voices for a story "based on a 19th Century Russian folktale, where a man mistakenly weds a corpse."

Trailer here.
 
 
lekvar
00:56 / 22.01.05
Damne, you beat me to it.
Just in time for my birthday, this looks faaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaantastic. The animation looks even better than The Nightmare Before Christmas. I wonder how well it'll play, given the current "moral" climate? Will we have to weather another wave of darklings? Will I have to update my just-shifted-back-into-color wardrobe?
Between this and "Coraline," 2005 is going to be a great year for animation.
 
 
Chiropteran
12:53 / 27.09.05
Corpse Bride opened (in the US) this past weekend - anyone else been to see it?

The animation was excellent (in the Nightmare Before Christmas style, but smoother), the characters were appealing, and the music was fun - four songs, including the Danny Elfman-voiced show-stopper "Remains of the Day."

The comparisons with Nightmare Before Christmas are inevitable, and probably not to Corpse Bride's advantage - on a technical level it far exceeded NBC, but the story was on a different scale - just a nice little folktale with a couple of songs (it was also pretty short - just 1hr, 14mn). Still, I think it worked out well on that level, and I would definitely like to see it again.

Incidentally, it was my two-year-old son's second theater-movie (the first was Pooh's Heffalump Movie), and he really enjoyed it.
 
 
PatrickMM
18:14 / 27.09.05
I'm a huge Burton fan, but I didn't really like this. Just because it's stop motion by Burton, you're going in comparing it to Nightmare, and then the film has so many things in common with NBC, Corpse Bride just suffers in comparison. The land of the dead is basically a remix of Halloweentown, but not as endearing, and while the jazzy song was great, it didn't match Oogie Boogie's, and the huge similarities between the two, both in the song itself and the staging, force you the compare the two. Same thing with the "Gonna' have a Wedding" song and 'Making Christmas' from Nightmare, same exact setup and structure, weaker payoff here. And the rest of the Elfman songs were virtually non-existent. I was hoping for something crazy after his great work in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

I did like Victor and Victoria, I'd love to see Emily Watson work with Burton in live action. The Corpse Bride's story worked well too. But the whole time, the jokes just felt too obvious and there wasn't the manic energy of Burton's best work. It wasn't boring, but it just never really got going.

And the stop motion was so good that I think it actually lost something. Part of the charm of stop motion is seeing the slightly odd movement, and recognizing that these characters are just a bunch of dolls on a stage. This movie was so thoroughly convincing, I never really got that, and as a result, this seemed more like a really well done CG movie than a stop motion piece. I know that's a bit of an odd complaint, but watch the film compared to the stop motion in something like Evil Dead II and you'll see the difference.
 
  
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