The Corpse Bride

Tim Burton returns to his roots with his latest work the ghoulish animated film "Corpse Bride". He revisits the stop-motion animation technique and the comic gothic style of his early masterpiece "Nightmare Before Christmas". Not a bad idea in itself but it means that this film is inevitably going to be compared to his earlier work. The bad news is that unsurprisingly it suffers by comparison. "Nightmare..." was quirkier, more original and it had better tunes. Parts of "Corpse Bride" feel recycled. "Nightmare..." is the real ghost at this feast.

The story line is based on an old Russian fairy tale and it definitely retains that timeless traditional fairy-tale feel. It begins in a gray Victorian city. Victor and Victoria are engaged to be married. They have never met but that doesn't matter. Victoria's penniless aristocrat family wants Victor's nouveau-riche family's money and as luck would have it Victor's family fancy rubbing shoulders with the toffs. The marriage is all arranged the stage is set. The night before the wedding the couple meets and with total disregard for the tradition of these things they decide that actually they quite like each other and getting married might not be the end of the world.

Fortunately everything doesn't go smoothly. Where would the plot go if it did? At the wedding rehearsal Victor is so nervous that he mucks up his vows and sets fire to his future Mother-in-law. A pretty tame obstacle for true love by fairy tale standards but at this point he makes a big mistake. He decides that the best place to practice his vows is the creepy wood outside town. It's the middle of the night and the wood is full of ominous looking ravens. Dun dun dun.

While practicing his vows he manages to accidentally marry a dead women. The way you do. I'm sure it happens all the time. The Corpse Bride is overjoyed by this unlikely accident. She is one of those old fashioned women who think that landing a husband will solve all their problems. To be fair she was left at the altar and then murdered by her fiancee.

The first part of the film is a bit slow but things soon liven up once our hero has been dragged down to the land of the dead by his Corpse Bride. Victor finds himself in a surprisingly lively afterlife. These are the scenes where Burton really lets his imagination run wild. He has a lot of fun with the idea that the land of the dead is much livelier than the land of the living. The drab gray place that the deceased refer to as "upstairs" is contrasted with their more colourful world. A world inhabited by skeletons, corpses, spiders and maggots. A world where the local bar's "head" waiter is a disembodied head, second hand shops sell helpful hands and everyone is always up for a party. The point seems to be that the living spend all their time worrying about things like money and social standing, but the dead have got nothing left to lose so they are free to enjoy death.

Victor doesn't really grasp the charm of Burton's Hades he wants to get back to his living fiancee Victoria. To complicate things further in his absence Victoria's parents have decided that since he seems to have done a runner they are going to marry her off to a sinister wedding-guest. Victor gradually finds himself more and more attracted to his Corpse Bride. It's a classic love triangle except that one of them is dead and that usually solves the problem.

It's the songs that really let this film down. I'm not a big fan of musicals but I think that if a filmmaker has decided to have his characters burst into song every now and again, for no real reason, then he should at least make sure the songs are catchy. "Corpse Bride" fails the test. Almost all of the musical numbers are bland and instantly forgettable. A lot of them sound pretty similar. The one exception is the performance by "The Skeletones". These Jazz playing skeletons sing a song about the Corpse Bride's sad history when Victor first arrives down below. It's the only decent musical moment in the film so pay attention to that bit.

Visually it's quite an impressive film. It's great to see stop-motion animation making a comeback. With this and Wallace and Gromit out at the same time the genre seems to be dominating the cinemas at the moment. Cynics will scoff that it's a blip and this is an art form that is going to be wiped out by computer animation but they said the same thing about cinema and TV. Some animators obviously feel that the painstaking, incredibly time-consuming labour of stop-motion animation produces an effect that can't be duplicated on a computer. If they didn't why would they go to all that effort?

"Corpse Bride" has some good moments and some neat ideas. There is no denying that visually it is all very clever but somehow it lacks a certain something. The songs are disappointing and there is a sense that the best jokes are ones Burton has told us before. The Corpse Bride is worth watching but it lacks the spark that would have brought it all to life.