Review #56 | Corpse Bride

This spooky tale will take you  to a place you will never have imagined it existed. The place where dead people go.

Corpse Bride, 2005

Tim Burton returns to the dark but fanciful animated style of The Nightmare Before Christmas with this stop-motion black comedy. Victor (voice of Johnny Depp) lives in a small European village in the 19th century, where he is pledged to marry Victoria (voice of Emily Watson), a partnership arranged by their parents. The two only meet the day before their scheduled nuptials, and Victor performs disastrously in the wedding rehearsal. Later that evening, while he is walking through the woods and hopelessly practicing his vows, he puts Victoria's wedding band on what looks like a branch. Victor quickly discovers this was a big mistake; as it happens, he has put the ring on the skeletal finger of the enchanted Corpse Bride (voice of Helena Bonham Carter), who then whisks him off to a dark and mysterious netherworld where they are now married. Victor is frightened in the land of the dead, and even realizes that he has fallen in love with his true fiancée, Victoria, so he searches for a way back to his own world. Directed by Tim Burton in collaboration with animator Mike Johnson, Corpse Bride features a stellar voice cast, including Albert Finney, Christopher Lee, Richard E. Grant, Joanna Lumley, and Danny Elfman (who also composed the film's musical score).

Tim Burton presents a spooky stop motion animated film that will blow your mind. In this world, dead people are not actually dead; they just go “downstairs”, which seems more joyful than the world of living.

Tim Burton cleverly depicts the reality of the living dullness. The people upstairs live like they have no soul and the people downstairs sing and dance are pretty passionate in everything they do. The plot of this story goes around Victor in trouble because of the unwanted vow he made to a corpse bride.

It is interesting to see how Victor chooses his ways and how things turned out to be. Corpse Bride delivers a great message of showing compassion and keeping promises. There were some great puns in this movie with some unique character designs. Just watching some character designs you can see how much further you can go with squashing and stretching human characters. Those characters don’t look like humans but they do resemble real ones.

Inside Outside Rating: 78%