Corpse Bride

Corpse Bride is an eerie fairytale from director Tim Burton and his favorite actor Johnny Depp. As expected from the duo who brought Edward Scissorhands to life Corpse Bride is a creepy tale of morals and misfits. The claymation is similar to the fabulous The Nightmare Before Christmas but the film lacks some of the joy and humor that marked that previous feature. As always Burton creates his own fantasy world where the dead have an existence underground not so different from the mostly unhappy people living above ground.


Corpse Bride tells the story of Victor Van Dort, a nervous young man set to wed a woman he has never met. Johnny Depp voices the anxious Victor as a gentle kindly soul who does what is right and doesn’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings. Victor of course possesses a good heart and a steely reserve to face the odd situation that befalls him. His intended, Victoria Everglot, it turns out is as kind and uncertain as he and the two fall quickly in love. Of course Victor completely messes up his wedding rehearsal going as far as to set his future mother-in-law’s dress on fire. Victor runs off into the woods determined to talk himself into performing the wedding appropriately and practices it in a graveyard even putting the ring on a nearby twig. Of course the twig turns out to be the finger of the corpse bride and Victor is whisked away to the underworld.


Here I am a little bit hazy. I don’t understand the rules between the world of the dead and the world of the living and this perhaps tarnishes the enjoyment of the rest of the film. Victor is brought to the land of the dead in an unknown fashion. He seems to be the only living being there but the story does not dwell on that fact. It instead focuses on the humorous characters there, dancing skeletons, dwarves with swords through them, skeleton dogs, etc. Victor and his bride must seek help to go back to the land of the living to see his parents. This is the only forced part of the film, I know Victor had to go back or no one in the land of the living would know why he had disappeared. But it seems out of character for the kindly Victor to lie to his new bride and trick her into going back so he can see his living fiancee.


There is of course a humorous sidekick. In this case a brain-eating maggot who looks and sounds like Peter Lorre. The rest of the characters are somewhat one dimensional, Victor is the son of fishmongers who want to move up in society. Victoria is the daughter of penniless nobility who are selling their daughter off to save their estate. The story focuses almost exclusively on Victor, Victoria, and the Corpse Bride everyone else is window dressing.


The Corpse Bride of course has a sad tale, she was killed on the eve of her wedding, the rest of the story is surprisingly bland and straightforward. There are no surprises here just unexplained activities. For instance the mob of the dead don’t seem to have any trouble going to the land of the living for a second wedding topside, though none of them have ever thought to go back there before. There is also some sort of reference to not interfering with the living though all of their actions towards Victor would seem to belie this.


The film is beautiful and lyrical as most of Burton’s films are. He is able to evoke a fantasy world that is both scary and enchanting. The bride may have bones sticking out and keep losing her eye but she is also naive and enthusiastic in a way that is endearing to both Victor and to the audience. As with many of Tim Burton’s works this one may get better with familiarity. Often the worlds he creates are so inaccessible on first viewing that much of the enjoyment is lost. But over time they become good friends and staples in DVD collections.