When I wrote up something about Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, I said that I would have loved it if I saw it at 13. Well, if I had seen The Corpse Bride at 9, it would have opened up whole new realms to me. Not only would I have loved it, it would have been one of my favorite films ever. Yet, while Hitchhiker’s Guide disappointed me as a 35 year-old, Corpse Bride still amazed me, and was a load of fun. (The fact that it opened with a Bugs Bunny Cartoon only helped.)
This film had the mix of humor, gorgeous animated beauty, eroticism, fear, songs and gothic horrors that enraptured and terrified me watching Disney’s Peter Pan, Pinocchio, Sleeping Beauty and – especially – Snow White.
Making the land of the living appear drab and dull and grey, while the underworld is a 1920s jazz party seems a simple enough switcheroo, but it works so well here, that I can’t imagine why Johnny Depp’s character would want to leave there at all. To say nothing of choosing the hubba-hubba decaying corpse over the lifelessly living Victoria.
As with Charlie & The Chocolate Factory, the couple of full-blown musical numbers were sung by 6 “silly†Danny Elfman voices, simultaneously singing in six octaves, and therefore almost completely indecipherable.
All of Tim Burton’s fetishes are on display here, going all the way back to his Frankenweenie: misfits, the love for a pet, the artistic youth, the oblivious and dangerous parents, and so on. I suppose some might get tired of watching him play it out over and over, as Burton has for 20 years, but I don’t. He’s not really making the same movie over and over, he’s just doing variations on his theme. And as Tim Burton does not write his own material, but only comes up with sketchy story outlines, he’s probably much more successful, and original, relying on real screenwriters than he’d be if he wrote it himself.
Though I think the story is based on a Jewish folk-tale, Burton neatly sidesteps religion at every pass, only having Christopher Lee go into his Exorcist rant near the end only to fuel a joke. Depp seemed to be the least interesting thing going on here voice-wise. Richard E. Grant, Albert Finney, Joanna Lumley, Lee, Bonham Carter; all memorable. But Depp seemed almost unnecessary, as if he wanted to play the role in an animated film as a mute, like Buster Keaton or Charlie Chaplin. Frankly, it wouldn’t surprise me if that was his goal. After all, this is the guy who admitted to playing his leading man role in Sleepy Hollow as a 13 year old girl. And the music, well, it can’t come close to the grand songs of Disney classics. If anything is really tired in Tim Burton’s formula, it’s got to be Danny Elfman. My favorite Burton score is Ed Wood, which was done by Howard Shore I think. I’d like to see him get used again in a Burton film.
…and all of this is NOT to say that everything else about the film was uniformly strong. A maggot – or anything – with the voice of Peter Lorre is a tired bit done to death in Looney Tunes, and the Rankin-Bass stop-motion-animated Mad Monster Party. And a xylophone solo done on the rib cage of a skeleton is really old. The writing was clever in spots, but it never did much more than advance the plot, which was pretty thin and didn’t have an ounce of surprise – unless you are 9, in which case it cleverly tied everything together perfectly.
I agree about Danny Elfman. I can remember just about every song from “Nightmare,” and not a single one from “Corpse Bride.”
I like your observations about the tired cartoon cliches. I noticed them, but they didn’t seem to bother me. And I quickly got over the “yeah, yeah, I get it” feeling when I read the name on the piano Victor plays in the parlor: “Harryhausen.” After seeing that, I sort of felt this film was not going to be too ashamed of recycling visual motifs and old gags from other cartoons, films, animated films.
I thought the ending was really touching, actually. There were some beautiful images there.
Just a side note: Alicia and I decided to sit way up front for this one. It was a bit crowded with kids, and for some reason they had all congregated in the back. Noisy as hell. So we sat about three rows from the front. I haven’t sat that close to a screen in a long while, and it really is a pretty extraordinary experience.
watched, liked, was not bothered by danny elfman. in fact, i thought the incidental music and the score, if not all the big songs, were great. and i thought that first song was very good indeed.
i wish richard e. grant would get more voiceover work. i insist that both he and ralph fiennes voice villains in the next wallace and gromit movie.
How about a live action film along the lines of Dirty Rotten Scoundrels with Grant and Fiennes as con men?
Fuck the awful casting of Lloyd Dobler in Ice Harvest and put those two to work on something very funny and dark. Hell, if you could get Bruce Robinson to direct the thing, you’d already be 3/4 of the way on to a classic British comedy.
I’d even suggest re-making an old Alec Guinness film if Tom Hanks hadn’t already shit all over that idea.
I did of course realize that much of the material Burton was working with was never meant to be original, but a tribute to the old animation studios classics. But I just came across a great post that compares two cartoons by Werks; one in B/W for Disney, one in in color for Columbia that’s pretty interesting, and which is close to the material in Corpse Bride.
http://classiccartoons.blogspot.com/2006/04/skeleton-frolic.html
I think I’ve seen the color one as a kid, though I’d love to see it again now.