Tim's Toons: Corpse Bride, ten years later
Friday, September 11, 2015 at 6:00PM 
Tim here. This past week marked the tenth anniversary of the festival premieres of two very different stop-motion animated features. We've recently chatted a bit about Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, so other than reminding you that it exists, and it's still delightful a decade on, I will pass it by in silence. Instead, I want turn everybody's attention to Corpse Bride, or if you prefer - the boys in marketing clearly did - Tim Burton's Corpse Bride. The second movie's reputation has gone off in a very different direction over the last ten years: while Were-Rabbit remains a touchstone of sorts thanks to its iconic stars, I'll bet that a good number of you just thought, "Huh, Corpse Bride, I forgot all about that".
That’s not unfair. Revisiting it for the first time in most of that same decade, I found it to be visually inventive, and dangerously rushed as a narrative: based on a Russian folk tale of a young man who accidentally weds a beautiful dead woman, the films never quite shakes the sketchy structure of a fable.
Mostly, it's a slight little slip of a thing, an exercise in letting former animator Burton get his feet wet in that medium alongside co-director Mike Johnson, and unworthy of much particularly energetic enthusiasm.
Certainly, the release a few years later of the stylistically similar but thoroughly more ambitious Coraline (directed by Henry Selick, the real genius behind Nightmare) has done nothing to make Corpse Bride any more essential. And yet here I go, asking you to maybe overlook all of that, because there’s something lovable beneath the film’s general triviality.
This is, for one thing, the closest we get to an actual Tim Burton film in the whole of the 2000s. It wasn’t nearly as clear in 2005 as it is in 2015 how thin the director was prepared to stretch his signature style: Planet of the Apes still looked like an aberration, and 2005’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory a mere miscalculation, rather than the template for several of Burton’s subsequent releases. On the backside of the unforgivable Alice in Uglyland, it’s nice to have a reminder that it wasn’t so long ago that Burton could still find something exciting and personal to draw him into a project.
For Corpse Bride is especially personal, full of obvious love from the filmmakers to their film like virtually nothing else in Burton’s late output. It has affection for its characters that warms up the pervasively blue and gray visuals (the afterlife being the only source of bright, saturated colors in the movie), and adds the necessary sense of lightnes to the decaying, zombified design.
t’s quintessential Burton, that is to say, blending the macabre and whimsical to charming rather than horrifying effect. I put it to you, readers, that the only 21st Century Burton films that completely work are this and Frankenweenie, the only two that are also stop-motion cartoons. And this is not a coincidence, I suspect. Breaking completely from reality is the director’s best trick for being able to explore feelings and characters from his distinctive personality without making it feel unpleasant and artificial.
At any rate, it’s a sweet character piece. The director’s insistence on casting some combination of Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter in every one of his films between 1999 and 2012 worked out better here than it ever would again: Depp’s dazzled innocence and Bonham Carter’s wistfulness cut against each other to provide a lovely bittersweet quality, and the filmmakers assembled a killer assembly of British character actors to back them up: Albert Finney, Joanna Lumley, Emily Watson, Tracey Ullman, and a small part for Christopher Lee, among others. The cast is enough to counteract the arch grotesquerie of the character designs, and leave us with the feeling of real people with hearts and souls maneuvering through the bizarre world and story, instead of being dropped into a menagerie of marketing-ready gothic perversions.
It is not, truthfully, likely to show up at the top of anybody’s Best of Tim Burton list. But I wouldn’t be at all shy about calling it the last one of his films that feels like he arrived ready to play 100%. How much comes from having a co-director, and how much the neat fit the material makes with his career-long preoccupations is impossible to say. Either way, the results are the same: a not so very old reminder of what makes Burton easy to love, instead of merely tolerable.
Reader Comments (10)
Very fine Elfman score, too. Naturally.
I'd also add "Sweeney Todd" to the short list of successful Burton films this century.
Corpse Bride and Big Fish (which I know you're not a fan of Tim) are actually my two favourite Burton films. I always hated the way Corpse Bride was immediately comsidered an afterthought to Wallace and Grommitt - the other HBC animated film that year. It's a thin slip of a film and definitely a fable but it really is one of most sincerely charming films of this century.
Rewatching it last week it's slimness (not even seventy minutes!) seems unusual because it really does feel complete. (I also love it's insistence on NOT pitting the two ladies against each other).
@Jonathon- agree with you about Sweeney Todd.
Corpse Bride is fun, but like you said, kind of forgetable. Maybe the shortness of the film has something to do with it.
I love Corpse Bride, and as someone who worships at the alter of Wallace & Gromit that is my highest compliment. What a great cast, and such a tender and moving film.
Too bad very few people really gave it a chance. Thanks for this write up.
I second the love to Big Fish.
It's such a lovely little movie. Especially with the ending and the simple but beautiful wedding vows.
Plus I always laugh like a complete moron of that visual gag where a skeleton is shocked and his jaw literally drops right off to the floor.
I feel the quality of lighting and character design alone make this a worthy watch. I fell head over heels for the story. It's slight, yes, but it's beautifully told. I often find myself singing "Remains of the Day" in my daily life. I can get away with it since I teach theater, but I can't think of too many other animated musicals I do that with. Nightmare Before Christmas with "Sally's Song" and "Baby Mine" from Dumbo. Those are the only ones off the top of my head.
I admire that they went musical with it. "Remains of the Day" remains a delight and even the title song has its charms. You're right that the film is somewhat forgettable, but also one of Burton's better entries in the last 15 years.
I agree with Glen. In terms of time and his filmography, Corpse Bride is still being discussed and watched. Will we still be talking about Alice in Wonderland? We will only be discussing Dark Shadows to talk about how great Eva Green was, not about the movie itself. Big Eyes was last year, right? (I already forgot that one) It seems that Corpse Bride and Sweeney Todd were the last good Burtan movies.
I admit this one has kind of disappeared from my memory too. Maybe I'll give it another shake
I've always held it against Burton how little his character design sensibilities for animation have developed since he was a student. Still, this and Frankenweenie are perfectly functional movies, even if they feel extremely light and insubstantial compared to Laika's output.
Considering the successes of this, Frankenweenie, and Sweeney Todd - the movies that most clearly indulge Burton's love of Victorian gothic and classic horror - as compared to basically everything else he's done since Sleepy Hollow (another movie that does not back down from Burton's most obvious obsessions), it makes me think that he's somebody who maybe just should not be pushed outside of his aesthetic comfort zones.