Victor dashes off to the woods, where he accidentally meets the Corpse Bride ( Helena Bonham Carter, who is Burton’s real-life love). The rehearsal turns chaotic when Victor can’t remember his lines and the austere, long-faced pastor ( Christopher Lee) sends Victor off into the night, humiliated, to learn his vows. “How could our family have come to this?” moans Maudeline upon meeting the unprepossessing Victor.Ī spoiler turns up at the wedding rehearsal in the dashingly pompous form of Lord Barkis Bittern ( Richard E. Although Victoria’s parents Maudeline (Joanna Lumley of Absolutely Fabulous) and Finis Everglot (Albert Finney) are unpleasantly disdainful of their intended nouveau riche in-laws, they need the money. That Victoria’s parents are down to their last shilling is a fact Victor Van Dort and his parents aren’t aware of, nor is anyone else, for that matter. It’s up above where Victor (voice by Depp) has been forced by his social-climbing mother and fish-canner father into an arranged marriage to the wispy Victoria Everglot ( Emily Watson), a young woman he has never laid eyes on, but who comes from a long socially stellar line. It also has the eerily goofy tone of The Nightmare Before Christmas, which revolves around Jack Skellington, the long dead skeletal hero of Halloweentown, who accidentally discovers Christmastown and decides to bring all its merriment home by taking over the role of Santa Claus.īurton clearly delineates the Land of the Living-in this case Victorian England-from the Land of the Dead by emphasizing blues and grays and dull mauves in the color palette of the human world, while the Land of the Dead is presented in festive, gay tones. The “Corpse Bride” certainly resurrects the spirit of “The Nightmare Before Christmas” (though with an even better look because the jerky stop-motion movements of the characters, in which the camera is stopped and the figures rearranged, have been smoothed out digitally). Yes, “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” fans.Danny Elfman composed the music for this movie too. The music is alright and they do help to advance the plot. “Corpse Bride” was written by Nightmare’s Thompson, plus John August and Pamela Pettler. This time Burton co-directed (with Mike Johnson) at the same time he was filming his hit Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, taking along that film’s star, Johnny Depp, as the hapless hero who accidentally wins the heart of a dead woman on the day before he is to be married to someone else. No wonder the Second-Hand Shoppe sells-you guessed it!-hands.It’s all accomplished with stop-motion puppets, which Burton used so effectively in 1993’s The Nightmare Before Christmas, a film he co-wrote with Caroline Thompson and produced, but did not direct. And the Corpse Bride of the title is forever dropping a hand, an arm or a leg bone. The headwaiter at an Underworld restaurant really is just a head. “Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride” is whimsical and romantic-although half its characters are the rotting dead-and it has a wacky sensibility to boot. This is not one of those ghoulish zombie horror flics. The “Corpse Bride” contains and interesting tongue-in-cheek feel for the confrontation between the living and the very lively dead. I once heard an actor make the passing comment “We all let Tim make movies, because it would be scary to see what he would do other wise.” Yes, his genius is a bit unusual, but the results are always visually stunning. He even used routines from a 1929 film called “Skeleton Dance” to create his own skeletal performance. Burton used a 55-week shoot, during which 109,000,440 frames had to be set up and filmed. The detail in this movie is so refined that it took animators 28 separate shots just to make the bride blink. This was also the first feature to be made with commercial digital still photography cameras (Canon SLR cameras with Nikon lenses) instead of film cameras. This was also the first stop-motion feature to use the new Apple Final Cut Pro during the editing process. The puppets that he used were made from stainless steel armatures covered with silicon skin. His films certainly have a style all their own. Tim Burton has always been known as a very innovative Director.
2 Comments
|
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |