CORPSE BRIDE
2005
Directed by Mike Johnson and Tim Burton
Written by John August, Caroline Thompson, Pamela Pettler, and Tim Burton
When the Golden Age of Tim Burton ended is a matter of debate, with some unwilling to consider it even lasted beyond his 1994 magnum opus, Ed Wood, but most would agree that it could not have still been happening by the time of his logy remake of Planet of the Apes in 2001, and that afterwards the filmmaker has (at the least) been hit-and-miss, while many would use meaner language than that. But however you feel about Burton, it's more-or-less objective fact that a much smaller fraction of his films in the 21st century gets mentioned in the same breath as his output from the 20th century, and while the former includes several big hits—probably nothing has hurt his reputation as much as the biggest hit of his career, his even-logier remake of Alice In Wonderland in 2010—really sizeable, passionate constituencies exist for only a few of them. One of those few—maybe the most actually-beloved movie Burton's made this millennium, maybe the only one that genuinely competes in people's hearts with his best works of the millennium past—is 2005's Corpse Bride, which, to point out the obvious, already sounds like the Tim fucking Burtonest thing possible, so it makes some sense that it would be. Then you find out he'd been intending to do it since the 90s, and it makes even more.
Specifically, Burton had hoped to do Corpse Bride—to which I'd certainly like to add the definite article, but, alas, I cannot—as soon as he'd finished The Nightmare Before Christmas* in 1993, but reality got in the way, partly the reality of Burton's commitments to making other films, but perhaps mostly the reality that Burton didn't, in the operative sense, actually make The Nightmare Before Christmas and also didn't own Henry Selick, the person who did, and Burton wouldn't have really known how to make Corpse Bride, for it, like Nightmare, was always to be a stop-motion animated cartoon, and despite a legitimate (if staled) experience in the art form, Burton was still less-present for its manufacture than even his producer credit on it would have indicated, and accordingly would've learned very little about the modern practice of that art form from his collaborator. Plus, despite Nightmare's success, stop-motion animation remained an iffy prospect in Hollywood; I'd suspect that Selick accidentally foreclosed any earlier existence for Corpse Bride in 1996 when he made his second stop-motion feature (with Burton still producing), James and the Giant Peach, a giant bomb and terrible movie. It also couldn't have helped that Burton's animation partnerships in the 90s were being run through Disney, and a movie even more active than usual about advertising its maker's apparently genuine desire to fuck a reanimated dead woman** doesn't seem like it would've gone all that far with that company. So it got backburnered, till Burton's reunion with his old and less uptight studio backers at Warners, who were after him to do a (logy? I actually like this one) remake of another Roald Dahl film, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (the name, of course, was reverted back to Dahl's original title), and to sweeten the deal for Burton to direct Charle and the Chocolate Factory, they agreed to fund his little hobbyhorse, a $40 million investment that, with its $118 million return, was more of a hit in its initial theatrical run than Nightmare had been.
Now, rubber-to-the-road, Burton didn't really make Corpse Bride either, but the actual director Mike Johnson—an animator on Nightmare and Giant Peach, who'd directed a little bit of stop-motion on television (gosh, remember the PJs?)—hasn't had the opportunity to develop as much of a public profile as Selick ("hasn't even had," you could say), so with Burton having a directorial credit to his name this time, in addition to his customary Tim Burton's _____ branding, Johnson's role on Corpse Bride has been almost entirely overshadowed. That doesn't seem very fair—his career since has really been almost nonexistent—and I wouldn't want to just let it slide. But what might be more interesting is a company's name in these credits, a certain "Laika Entertainment," and we all recognize that name, coined only a few months before the film's release as a result of the Will Vinton Studios' takeover at the hands of billionaire's boy Travis Knight. Laika's contribution is hard to pin down, as the studio doesn't (or perhaps contractually can't) make a big deal out of it, and Knight's name isn't on it. But they provided the director (Will Vinton Studios is not most famous for The PJs, but it was one of their last projects), and I have the notion they provided production resources (for example, computer-controlled animation cameras and facilities for the parts done in Portland), and they appear to have provided no trivial number of animation staff and/or contractors.
So dig through Corpse Bride and you'll find animators who for all intents and purposes have been Laika lifers, as well as figures like storyboarder Chris Butler, later to write or direct the majority of Laika's movies, and especially cinematographer Pete Kozachik, Selick's guy going all the way back to "Slow Bob In the Lower Dimensions," and about to direct photography on Coraline. At the same time, not everybody here ultimately cleaved to Laika (notably, Kozachik did not), and I think there's a claim to be made that Corpse Bride was more immediately important to the vitalization of American stop-motion animation in the modern era than Nightmare was, or could have been, serving as ground zero for Laika but also for (obviously enough) Burton's own stop-motion follow-up, Frankenweenie, as well as the relevant Wes Anderson films, and, even way out in the 2020s, Guillermo del Toro and Mark Gustafson's (not himself of Corpse Bride, so maybe The freaking PJs is the true wellspring of all 21st century American stop-motion animation) Pinocchio. Why, even without a full list yet, there are already some names that Corpse Bride has in common with Wildwood. For our purposes, to the side of the industrial history, it also means that Corpse Bride was crafted in no small part by the talent gathered by a wealthy eccentric who was making it his life's work to recreate Selick's expert puppet show—Kozachik makes that connection quite concrete—and that determination is already paying off bigtime, though between Burton and Selick imprinting their personalities upon Laika in its formative stages, it's no surprise that their first film that couldn't be reasonably classified as "horror" took fourteen more years and was still about cryptozoological monsters.
And then there is Burton, and though Caroline Thompson is back from Nightmare as a (co-)screenwriter, I guess there's no sense in trying to ascribe any joint authorship with anybody this time, except maybe to Danny Elfman again, which as we discussed on Nightmare is arguably another way of saying "it's Tim Burton's movie." Burton's brought his other muses now, too, Johnny Depp and present flame Helena Bonham Carter, the former of whom you're retrospectively surprised wasn't Jack Skellington already, except insofar as Elfman was always going to be three-quarters of that performance. There is, anyway, no mistaking the Burtonesqueness here, from the spindly, sickly stick figure at the center, to the exaggerated satirical shapes of most everyone surrounding him, to the bug-eyed countenances on everyone—this is before we get to the spousal corpse—and you can, actually, tease out some distinctions in the design mentality from this and from the Laika to come if you liked (both set hazily in grotesque 19th century neverwhens, The Boxtrolls makes the best compare and contrast). But Burton does in fact share his characters-created-by credit, substituting for a writing credit, with one Carlos Grangel, the point of contact with the firm of Mackinnon and Saunders, who did much of the primary fabrication work on the models (and did so again for Selick with Coraline), though till now their bread-and-butter had been as character design consultants for Amblimation/DreamWorks. Grangel's simultaneously described Burton as "the guy who knows exactly what he wants... the guy who can do it himself" and as a director who was unusually hands-off in specifying what he wanted, willing to offer generous latitude to his design staff's own preferences; and this seeming contradiction, that seems like even more of a contradiction while you're watching the damn movie, is, I guess, only resolved by appeal to Burton as such a strong but settled visual personality by 2005 that you could deliver the perfectly Burtonesque to Burton without a lot of input from Burton.
Which seems slightly bad and prone to heading into decadence, which by most lights is I suppose exactly what happened, but it's nice to have maybe one last great example of Burton's style, one that feels like it's been born from an inspiration rather than an abdication of responsibility. And so, now, we're reminded that he'd had this idea, or rather he'd had this idea introduced to him, a long time before, by way of Joe Ranft while they were working on Nightmare, where Ranft, naturally-enough given the morbid circumstances, was reminded of the legend of "The Finger," a deeply uninteresting Jewish folktale that nevertheless begins compellingly with the accidental nuptials of its feckless bridegroom and his new wife, the shallowly-buried corpse, but concludes with what reads like a legal brief, as a scholar, after a great deal of research into the issue, adjudges that—get this crazy interpretation of the law!—corpses don't actually have the capacity to marry, and also just in case here are several other legal justifications to void the marriage. Burton stopped listening after the beginning; in the movie, when the bridegroom's abandoned, alive fiancee demands of a cleric "can the living marry the dead?" I don't think he even answers her question, he just assumes she's having a nervous breakdown, and even if Corpse Bride does have its own third act problems, it figures out something slightly more dramatic.
So, in 18XX, in what I'm told is England (I thought it was the Netherlands), there live two families, the next even more misshapen than the first, the rich, joylessly bourgeois Van Dorts (Albert Finney and Joanna Lumley) and the broke but equally-joyless aristocrats the Everglots (Tracey Ullman and Paul Whitehorse), who have contrived to marry their respective children, who have somehow turned out to be reasonably cute 20-ish year olds despite their ancestry, Victor (Depp) and Victoria (Emily Watson). Things aren't going well, in part because Victor is unbearably anxious and physically clumsy (for instance, he sets Mrs. Everglot partly on fire), but he has, in his quiet way, managed to charm Victoria, assuaging her nervousness about being forcibly married off and undoubtedly earning her love, thanks to the gentleness she perceives in his very clumsiness, which he can banish long enough to play a little sonata for his intended, or at least as long as he doesn't know she's there. Victor thinks she's swell too, but unfortunately, practicing his slightly-complicated ritual vows on a moontide walk in the woods, he accidentally weds a certain corpse. This is Emily (Bonham Carter), murdered by a bandit years before while waiting to elope with her great love, and she is not to be denied now, almost wholly incognizant of her disgusting status as a rotting dead body or that when someone shrieks and flees from you, they probably didn't mean to marry you; but she catches her unathletic husband easily enough, and renders him off to the underworld. Victor is horrified, but hatches a stratagem to get back "upstairs," tricking Emily into "meeting his parents," though Victor is in no position to use his very limited time abroad to effect any further plan and, worse still, though he doesn't know it, he's been seen with his new bride and Victoria has a new suitor, the precipitous Barkis Bittern (Richard E. Grant), who has convinced the relevant decisionmakers, her parents, to offer their daughter's hand in marriage to him instead.
You can probably see where this is going, and you can probably see what elements it's going to use to solve its inherent problem (I said high spoilers, but having never seen this, I was astonished to realize a few minutes in, as Victor and Victoria's courtship is detailed, that it was going to require a herculean act of deftly-emotional storytelling, that Corpse Bride was very unlikely to undertake, for its hero to actually end up with the kink object), and you can probably spy a fair few incipient problems, as well. But only incipient as yet, and the first near-hour of this 77 minute film isn't setting many footsteps wrong, the "wrongest" being that, as something that's still a kid's film, it's trying a tiny bit too hard to be funny, though even then it's still mostly managing to be amusing; dialogue misapprehending corsets isn't funny, for example, and the town crier (Enn Reitel) "humorously" regurgitating plot points at all and sundry is anti-funny, but just looking at the Everglots, whether it be the bulbous prominence of Mrs. Everglot's chin or the not-even-really-borderline body horror of Mr. Everglot wrenching his permanent scowl into an asymmetrical rhombus of a smile, is pretty much always funny. (The Van Dorts are much less interesting-looking but, to be fair, much less in the movie; my favorite design—comma living person—is undoubtedly the priest (Christopher Lee), if only for the great little layout gag that showcases the absurdity of his vestments, starting with the tip-top of his towering, jet-black mitre.)
But even with its 77 minute handicap it leaves just-sizeable-enough gaps in its parody of marriage mart miserablism for a genuinely sweet and recognizable romance between its two living principals*** in no small part driven by, I'm afraid, a rather good performance from Depp (and, surely, a good performance from Watson). Partly that's even because he's not pushing himself at all, but while his performance is not totally anonymous, it's permitting an anonymity, if you didn't already know who it was, exploiting the possibilities of animation to wisely regress his age from his current "weird, loud" persona to his older, "weird, soft-spoken" one, correctly so in service to this Lovecraftian dweeb. Meanwhile, we already have the aesthetic gambit Burton's devised, not a particularly novel one, but by God it's one he believes in and its reverse Scissorhands could be held up as the strongest or at least the purest example of Burton's mall goth mind in his filmography, with his monstrously colorless land of the so-called "living," all a gray-on-gray dour decay, broken only rarely by, say, the color-symbolic blue moth Victor lets free in the film's opening move of an awfully-ambitious "crane" shot.**** This would be (and frankly was starting to get) dreary, but of course it flips itself upside down when Victor's dragged to a very vibrant and colorful hell, populated by corpses (it's not entirely clear if this is a true, physical realm under the ground, but decomposition certainly happens), themselves equally vibrant and colorful, usually even when they're just skeletons, though the most memorable corpses tend to be grosser than skeletons, like the guy who got split in twain and is still split in twain.
Let's lay it on the line: I strongly prefer this to Nightmare—its story has better structure, its infernal humor is edgier—and if I have any lingering doubts it's only because Nightmare is the iconic one. Lingering doubts are dispelled pretty totally, however, by the time one realizes this is also an Elfman musical, and not just a movie with a scene-setting song because of the holdover influence of 90s Disney. Some of this is pure temperament: I hate sung-through musicals and this is a "normal" musical, where songs emphasize plot developments rather than running through a spoke-sung slurry. But, in any event, I personally find that Elfman's management of distinctive songs with distinctive goals to be better, and you can sometimes (though not in the first one, "According To Plan," which is only just-fine musical theater) kind of discern the Oingo Boingo in this dead woman's party, particularly in the ironically-high-energy introduction-to-the-underworld song, "Remains of the Day," that also tends to confirm any negative inferences re: Elfman's cavalier attitude that you might've drawn from Oogie Boogie, as it's being sung by Elfman himself in the guise of "Bonejangles," which is arguably racist but inarguably a good pun.
If there's a complaint there, it's that this is a small fantasy, much smaller-seeming than Nightmare—it feels like underworld and overworld alike have trouble having distinct-and-apart locations, which is maybe less of a problem with a small town (though in Halloweentown it didn't feel like you could throw a rock into the haunted woods from the town square), but more of one with a whole afterlife that, even so, clearly occupies no more than a single acre. But this isn't too important, since the spectacle is bound up more in the person we meet from beyond the grave.
And so there is, at last, Emily, our corpse bride herself, and at least without racking my brain to see if the claim holds up we have the best-designed figure in a filmography as much about character design as anything else, this moldly blue corpse—which raises a potential quibble, even her hair is blue, but for reasons we'll get into in a second it doesn't feel wrong—still in the remnants of her mother's wedding dress, which has held up, in fact, a skosh better than her body. Well, Burton and Grangel have positively made sure her tits haven't collapsed, despite the musculature having fallen off her ribcage, but she's in a very fanciful state of decay that works wonderfully for a cartoon about a beautiful but undeniably icky corpse, with a penchant for losing her right eye from its socket (home to her best friend, the maggot consuming her insides (Reitel again), the visual and performance both being patterned upon Peter Lorre because "I dunno, why not?" is a question one might reasonably ask), plus several new holes in her (the more to love, Burton might say), notably a black-rimmed fungous void in her left cheek big enough to require the teeth to be visible inside the maquette, which seems like a remarkable coup from the puppetmakers. (For dialogue animation purposes, Emily has a mobile tongue and I tried very hard to see if that was ever visible moving inside the hole, but unfortunately I never caught it if it did.) The thing, though, is how the movie treats her: that blue hair isn't an issue because it feels as much like a result of the ethereal glow that attends Emily the whole time—her blue skin can almost feel like its fluorescing under blacklighting, though this impression is very restrained—but what isn't restrained is that she's being constantly followed by an unmotivated toplight (sometimes a backlight) that interacts gorgeously with the phatasmal, billowing white of her dress and veil, pretty hard not to call anything but the masterpiece of Kozachik's career.
And, you know, that's the fun stuff, but Emily is creating a future for stop-motion animation in other ways, and ways that Nightmare was only gesturing at with its technological advances on behalf of its quasi-skullfaced hero and bag-of-lawn-trash heroine. So there's a not-inconsiderable amount of Sally in Emily (beyond basic conceptual similarity, there's the insectoid eyes and the Glaswegian mouth scars that are now just formalized as an excessively wide mouth), but there's not ever the vapidity that Nightmare's love interest could fall into, with this dead freak afforded the most exceptionally subtle and human gradations of emotion. In 2005, there's the real possibility she represents the objectively most flexible and variegated maquette(s) built to that date (Victor and Victoria might tie as the second-most). So, if you'll indulge a look at a piece of animation history that I'm not sure has fully gotten her due, let's see how flexible and variegated:
Just to point out those last two (not the same scene) are subtle and human enough to differentiate between hot anger and cold anger. And these are expressions Emily does absolutely have a need for, in order to lead a story that Bonham Carter and the animators alike are making a heroic bid at making some sense out of, which for one thing leaves its titular character totally disinterested in finding her actual fiancé. So we are starting to run into those real problems now, though Emily herself never quite rises to the level of one, the animation and Bonham Carter completely succeeding at their task, because in their telling, Emily's mind has simply disintegrated along with her body, so while there is no malice to this hungry ghost, and a startling amount here for us and eventually Victor to pity, we do see why it might be difficult to get her to understand that she's doing anything wrong—or even anything particularly unnatural.
But one of those problems is the movie is just too dang short, managing to hit all the most crucial beats but past the first act it can have no patience with them, most noticeably when Emily, as a token of her love for Victor, and an early sign she's a sweetheart rather than malevolent, gifts him his (already) dead dog (superlative "shake the box" joke here, too, by the way), and the question isn't even "how did she know about that?" but "when did she do that?" Similar problems accrue, likewise, to Victoria, a basically-instrumental character the movie nonetheless has a genuine interest in, and still can't do anything with except feint at agency because they don't have time for her to escape her parents again and have any quest of her own.
Now, I implied already the film is okay with you getting ahead of its fairy tale plot, which is perfectly alright, but even in these circumstances (semi-serious gore! the apparent absence of a Judeo-Christian God! the constant possibility of necrophilia!), this movie made at Warners and at the collection of workspaces including Laika's that Burton and Johnson yoked together still has to have its Disney death, when it should be swerving into severe horror, maybe even "a happy ending" of a different sort for Emily—at the least, it should be offering more permission for violence for the creepy corpse, so the comic climactic action (which shouldn't be comic and is frankly only "comic" anyway) doesn't fall to Victor, presently doing battle with a villain he just met (hell, I'd be happier if it fell to Victoria)—for Emily has, after all, been made a promise and, like the rabbi once laboriously spelled out, the priority of a promise is an important factor in the disposition of a contractual dispute. (There's at least a hint of horror now, but it's not Emily who gets to mete it out.) A shabbier ending than is deserved, then, for a movie that still hasn't been flawlessly-told in the first place. But it's accomplished a great deal already, and even in its desultory finale it still hasn't dissipated its strengths, not least the bittersweet new heartache our corpse bride takes upon herself and the sensitivity it shows to all its principals, but above all the morbid loveliness of how it's brought her tale to life.
Score: 8/10
*The Nightmare Before Christmas, huh?
**Before I tell you, guess who Corpse Bride stars. Then I'll bet you five dollars he hit on Geena Davis, Catherine O'Hara, and Michelle Pfeiffer. It would of course be unsporting to bet you any dollars he hit on Eva Green or Monica Bellucci.
***Though I absolutely wouldn't have minded if they didn't sandbag one of the movie's most delicate moments with that melt-your-fucking-face-off in-joke of a "HARRYHAUSEN" brand piano.
****Or perhaps the scarequotes are not actually appropriate in stop-motion, though I'm pretty confident the moth itself is CGI—when the symbol is paid off on in the finale, it's of course CGI—inaugurating the Laika Method of mostly stop-motion juiced with usually judicious CGI, though in a minor gripe I don't really think the movie benefits from the literalistic imagery of its last couple shots.
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