Top Dvd Of The Week 03/02/06
Tim Burton's Corpse Bride (Widescreen Edition) Score: 85
"Tim Burton's Corpse Bride," a literally eye-popping film, may be the purest expression of Burton's comic-nightmarish neo-gothic vision so far. It also restores the venerable technique known as stop-motion animation to its rightful place as one of cinema's greatest forms.
Set in a "Sleepy Hollow"-ish Victorian town, the film starts like a dark fairy tale with grotesque faces right out of a Fellini film. The movie tells the story of Victor Van Dort (voice of Burton frequent alter ego Johnny Depp), an enormously orbed, decidedly Ichabod Crane-Edgar Allan Poe-type fellow. Prodded by nouveau riche parents (Paul Whitehouse and Tracey Ullman), Victor is about to marry Victoria (Emily Watson). But when Victor botches the wedding rehearsal and is chastised by Pastor Galswells (Christopher Lee), he goes to a moonlit, enchanted-looking forest, practices the wedding ritual and inadvertantly places the ring on the bony finger of a corpse buried in a shallow grave. Voila, he's married to Emily (Helena Bonham Carter). The newlydead, I mean newlywed, wife and reluctant husband are then transported to the Land of the Dead, where skeletal children play in the streets, skeletal dogs bark and frolic, the furniture is recycled caskets and most of the inhabitants are skin and bones, minus the skin.
Co-directing with animator Mike Johnson, who worked on the similar Burton- produced "The Nightmare Before Christmas" (1993), Burton has magnificently transformed the artistic vision he has expressed in drawings and storyboards into "living," three- dimensional figures. A gorgeous, cadaverously hued danse macabre, "Corpse Bride" employs a technique that harks back to cinema's origins and yet looks as current as any CGI film I've seen, perhaps even more so. Because of the fairy tale-like simplicity of John August ("Big Fish"), Caroline Thompson ("The Nightmare Before Christmas") and Pamela Pettler's script, "Corpse Bride" is also not hobbled by the premise or padding that bedevils Terry Gilliam's otherwise similar "The Brothers Grimm." This is one "Corpse" I can't wait to see again.
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