CORPSE BRIDE

The animation team of Arthur Rankin and Jules Bass, Jr., aka the Dynamic Duo of Animagic, was a partnership that brought network television some of the most beloved and entertaining holiday specials ever made. During my childhood, no Christmas would Dbe complete without a viewing of Rankin and Bass’s RUDOLF THE RED-NOSE REINDEER (1964), THE LITTLE DRUMMER BOY (1968), SANTA CLAUS IS COMIN’ TO TOWN (1970), and THE YEAR WITHOUT A SANTA CLAUS (1974), to name just a few. The technique they used was stop-motion animation, a method of moving the puppets a fraction of an inch at a time and photographing them one frame at a time. Widely considered to be the most painstakingly slow method of filmmaking ever devised, the technique resulted in some truly fun shows, coupled with equally catchy songs.

Somewhere in the midst of making these specials, Rankin and Bass found time to make the MAD MONSTER PARTY (1967), a delightful feature-length film about Baron Boris von Frankenstein who realizes that he’s getting on in years and decides to hand his laboratory over to his incompetent nephew, Felix Flankin (sounds like the company I used to work for…) The film was shown theatrically as an afternoon matinee for kids, and I saw it on television in my youth. Apparently, so did Tim Burton, who is no stranger to imagination. His love of these types of shows propelled him into a successful film career. His earliest foray into this type of animation resulted in VINCENT (1982), a stop-motion short he made in black and white about a young boy who idolizes Vincent Price. He followed this up by the little-seen HANSEL AND GRETAL (1982). About ten years later he produced the amazing THE NIGHTMARE BEFORE CHRISTMAS (1993), a phenomenally entertaining stop-motion epic with equally brilliant Danny Elfman tunes that took some 2.5 years to make! Director Henry Selick followed this up with JAMES AND THE GIANT PEACH (1996), a good attempt to turn my favorite children’s book into a film musical, but this combined live action with stop-motion animation and resulted in a less-than-stellar film experience.

CORPSE BRIDE is Tim Burton’s latest foray into stop-motion animation, a film that he directed while he was shooting CHARLIE AND THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY. Although not as good as THE NIGHTMARE BEFORE CHRISTMAS, CORPSE BRIDE does manage to tell a story about love lost, with the requisite in-jokes and visual nods to genre films of the past.

The film begins with a marriage being arranged by Victor Van Dort’s and Victoria Everglot’s parents. Victor’s parents, impecunious aristocrats, desperately want their son to marry Victoria, who comes from a family of rich fishmongers (they live in a house that would make Charles Foster Kane envious). This would provide wealth and respectability to the two families, respectively, hence the pressure on the hapless Victor to perform well during the wedding rehearsal. Fumbling with the ring, unable to light the candle, and forgetting the words to his wedding vows, Victor is so nervous about the prospect of marriage that he cannot even pronounce the word. One thing he can do properly is play the piano, a “Harryhausen” no less, which Victoria overhears prior to the rehearsal and consequently falls in love with him.

Dejected, Victor walks through the woods and practices his vows. He places the ring on what looks like a twig but turns out to be a partially buried female skeletal hand sticking out of the snow. Amazingly, there is a woman attached to this hand, a “corpse bride” named Emily Everglot, who is flattered that Victor has asked for her hand in marriage. Emily was killed on her wedding day (how horrific!) and has been waiting for a new suitor. She takes Victor into her world of skeletons and rotted people, and Victor becomes aware that there is most definitely a life after death. Whereas the world of the living is rule-driven, stilted and generally colorless, the afterlife is one of merriment and fun. This dichotomy is illustrated by the almost black and white environment of reality, and the beautiful Christmas tree-like bright colors of the dead – a nice changed from what we usually expect. This notion calls to mind THE LITTLE MERMAID’s Sebastian telling Ariel that “life under the sea is better than anything they’ve got up there.”

Naturally, Victor’s current predicament poses many problems, not the least of which lie with his and Victoria’s parents. Victor himself is so frightened of marriage that he wants to get the ring back from Emily and get an annulment. At the same time, a sinister man, Barkis Bittern, who represents both wealth and class to Victoria’s parents, is now planning to marry Victoria against her personal wishes. It all comes to a head when Emily confronts Barkis, and realizes that he’s her former fiancé who killed her on her wedding day, and he was planning to do the same to Victoria.

All of this seems rather macabre, and before you blame Burton for being mean and/or misogynistic, the story of CORPSE BRIDE is not his, but has in fact been around for nearly 500 years. Rather than recapitulate this centuries-old folktale, you can read about it and . These sites make for a very interesting read.

The movie, as one might expect, is stunning to look at. Burton’s strength lies in his ability to make the dreary beautiful. Just as Burton’s SLEEPY HOLLOW is a gorgeous and gothic-looking film, CORPSE BRIDE’s milieu is the Halloween-like jubilance we saw in THE NIGHTMARE BEFORE CHRISTMAS. The characters are all strange-looking caricatures with highly exaggerated features. Victor actually looks like Vincent, the character from Tim Burton’s black and white short of the same name, all grown up. Victoria’s father looks like a Gerald Scarfe creation from PINK FLOYD THE WALL, and her mother looks like a first-grade teacher I once knew. Emily, one of the most attractive corpses to grace the silver screen, looks like Sally from THE NIGHTMARE BEFORE CHRISTMAS, and the maggot, who slithers inside Emily’s head and offers her advice, is modeled after Peter Lorre both in looks and voice.

Despite the multitude of songs that permeate the soundtrack, however, none of them are particularly memorable. This is surprising considering that the music is by Burton’s long-time collaborator, Danny Elfman.

Despite this drawback the film is most definitely worth seeing, even if the look is a bit familiar. The puppets themselves were fitted with intricate mechanics to create subtle nuances and the effect is amazing.

I am looking forward to an in-depth DVD to reveal the precedent-setting process of filming and editing CORPSE BRIDE. The movie was shot almost entirely on 31 Canon EOS-1D Mark II cameras, and was completely edited on Apple’s Final Cut Pro. The obvious advantage to shooting on a still camera is that the size of the equipment is reduced tremendously.

I hope that Burton makes another one of these films sometime soon.

- Jonathan Stryker

WHAT YOU SAID [VIEW]

Carmilla said

QUOTE All of this seems rather macabre

Except for the fact that Emily was killed on her wedding night, the rest of the story seems quite romantic in general. I liked it a lot, and the songs weren't too many and some of them were actually pretty cool -like the skeleton number after he marries the corpse-. The animation is fantastic and the coloring was perfect, just like in Nightmare Before Christmas.

QUOTE I hope that Burton makes another one of these films sometime soon.

So do I!