Corpse Bride

Who else but Tim Burton could bring to life a Corpse Bride and craft a nightmarish animated delight that’s fun for the whole family? Returning to the hugely imaginative world of stop-motion animation (following The Nightmare Before Christmas and James and the Giant Peach), Burton, with co-director Mike Johnson, invites viewers to visit the drearily drab Victorian mansions of the living, where young Victor Van Dort (Johnny Depp) is set to wed Victoria (Emily Watson). But the wedding rehearsal goes sour and, in the kind of eerily gothic forest that only exists in Burton-land, Victor somehow finds himself accidentally married to the Corpse Bride (Helena Bonham Carter), a blue-tinted, half-skeletal specter with a chatty maggot-in-residence behind one of her prone-to-popping eyeballs. This being a Burton creation, the underworld of the dead proves to be a much livelier and more colorful place than the stuffy, above-ground world of the living, presenting Victor with quite a dilemma: should he return to Victoria, or remain devoted to his Corpse Bride? Propelled by a ghoulish Danny Elfman score and spot-on voice casting (including Tracey Ullman and Christopher Lee), Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride, a 2006 Oscar-nominee for Best Animated Feature, is a fun, demented and strangely romantic treat. (Dir. by Tim Burton & Mike Johnson, 2005, USA, 77 mins., Rated PG)