Corpse Bride / Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride

After the success of The Nightmare Before Christmas and before his remake of Frankenweenie, Tim Burton had another tale to tell as a feature-length stop-motion animation. Corpse Bride was his first attempt at directing a stop-motion feature, Nightmare having been helmed by James and the Giant Peach and later Coraline director Henry Selick - though Peach stalwart Mike Johnson took a co-director’s credit here and presumably showed Burton the ropes ahead of his solo Frankenweenie.

I have to say, it doesn’t seem like seven years since The Corpse Bride came out, though thinking back I remember seeing cosplay of it at a convention in 2006. I missed it when it was in cinemas and always intended to catch it at some point, but the opportunity didn’t come until today.

And I have to say, it rather deserves the plaudits and minor cult status it has earned. It’s no Nightmare Before Christmas, and doesn’t really tug at the heartstrings enough to really stand out even in the stop-motion animation world, but it was an excellent watch because it does everything right. The songs are done right. The animation is done right. The designs, done right. The script and the pacing – right. And yet it still has that odd B-movie quirkiness Tim Burton does best to give it an edge.

A sheltered young woman of noble stock and a rather wet young man from a nouveau riche family of considerable wealth are betrothed, though they have never met. On the eve of their marriage, young Victor and Victoria finally meet and hit it off, Victoria finding Victor’s piano-playing and diffident nature quite charming. However, an overbearing pastor makes him lose his nerve at a rehearsal for the wedding and he goes into the forest to practice. However, putting his ring onto what he thinks is a branch as he speaks his vows is a ‘grave mistake’ – as the poster jokes – for in a shallow grave is a pretty recently-deceased corpse, and the misunderstanding fuels the rest of the drama. The only slightly dodgy point is the baddie, Lord Bittern, who not only is coincidentally (and very obviously) linked to the Corpse Bride, but for a clearly intelligent conman misses the very transparent reason the aristocratic child of very snobby parents is marrying into a wealthy but middle-class trading family.

It’s a small-scale story that intentionally or not has a nice contrast between the limited cast of the living world – essentially the betrothed, their amusing grotesque parents, their staff, a love rival, the pastor and a town crier – and the exuberant and populous purgatory, where most scenes are crowd scenes and every little creature seems to talk except for the ghost dog right out of Funnybones. The characters in the living world are hilarious caricatures while those in the land of the dead are very quickly-defined bit parts where just about anything is possible. It makes for a grimly comic mood that keeps the pace brisk.

The vocal performances here are excellent – while Tim Burton’s usual stars Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter provide mostly functional performances that nonetheless are immediately sympathetic, as does Emily Watson, a cast of British comic and horror talents are clearly having an excellent time here. Christopher Lee’s gruff pastor has all the expected gravitas, and Albert Finny tries hard to out-gruff him. Harry Enfield and Fast Show fixture Paul Whitehouse (who Depp has expressed great admiration for) plays multiple roles, and Jane Horrocks crops up as a spider. The late Michael Gough, another Hammer actor and the Alfred in Burton’s Batman films, has a charming wise man role, and Richard E. Grant is his usual wonderful snarling posh bad guy. But stealing the show every time she speaks is Joanna Lumley, with a rich voice like no other. 

Then there’s Danny Elfman singing, and sounding like he’s having more fun than anyone else.  

I have to say, I was also probably more impressed by the stop-motion animation here than in any other Burton film. It wasn’t the spectacle – it was the small details. If that fabric rippling in the wind was done frame-by-frame, it was done by consummate masters of their craft. It looks fantastic. Spiders’ legs can’t be easy to do in this sort of medium, but they look great. And that pleasant creepy-but-still-soft aesthetic that persists in Frankenweenie looks rather nice here.

In some ways I feel like this is the purest form of Tim Burton’s style – everything is his vision, and hung on a good, classic, B-movie premise without the need to make it in some way metatextual or ironic. And it’s entertaining to boot. Great stuff.

Frankenweenie

Tim Burton’s latest attempt to get back into critical favour – after slipping considerably in the past few years – is a self-homage to a time of homages. Burton has gone back to his 1984 short live-action film Frankenweenie – his second-ever live-action work – and his early propensity to pastiche schlocky old films. I do understand this – his best films had an excuse to revel in his love for B-movies, Ed Wood in particular – and aside from the dodgy last few minutes, Frankenweenie actually was one of his best and most heartfelt bits of filmmaking. But going back to it now, as well as gathering a whole lot of cast members from his previous works, smacks just slightly of cynicism and artifice – a little like when a rich, middle-aged band try to recapture the sound of when they were young and hungry and it all sounds a bit false…I’m looking at you, KoRn.

But Burton having fun and paying tribute to the things he loves is the best Burton – and this is definitely a good film. I recommend it and I definitely enjoyed it. It just wasn’t quite what I had hoped it would be, and I think part of the problem was that I have seen the original and was therefore aware of the bits that were added – and whether or not the additional material fit in. And while much of the transition to the big screen made a lot of sense – I loved the fleshing-out of the heavily-accented Vincent Price-like teacher, for example, and his brilliant scene at the PTA meeting – others were just awkwardly tagged-on.

The overall structure is the same in this stop-motion remake. Lonely young Victor likes making monster flicks with his dog Sparky as the star. When Sparky is in a traffic accident, Victor is inspired by a science lesson showing a frog’s legs twitching when electricity is supplied to re-animate Sparky’s corpse. His experiment is a success, but he has to keep Sparky hidden, because people won’t understand.

This is where there’s a bit of a divergence, one of the more awkward ones. In the original, Sparky gets out of the house and runs amok in the neighbourhood. There are some amusing scenes were he’s mistaken for something hideous. This is in the animated version, but goes nowhere and oddly gets dropped, ultimately seeming a bit random. Instead, Victor’s schoolmates learn his secret and emulate his successes – only they do not act out of love, meaning what they raise is more terrible. The end result of it is the same, though – Sparky is mistaken for a monster and a mob chases him with flaming torches.

In the original, the climactic action amusingly takes place in the windmill of a crazy golf course. Here, that’s replaced by the large windmill symbolic of ‘New Holland’s Dutch heritage, which is amusing mostly because I know it’s an alternative to the golf course. There is more action in this version, but the ending is largely the same, and thankfully with animation, you don’t have the problem of trying to pretend an almost weightless puppet is Bastion from The NeverEnding Story.

My problems here are the way things just seem to have been tacked on to the bare bones of the old story. Winona Ryder’s character is the most obvious one – she just seems totally extraneous and barely interacts with the other characters. Her father is good for plot impetus, but there’s nothing to him. Burton – or his scriptwriters – made the decision to change the parents from the slightly unsettling, kooky normal people they were in the original (thanks largely to Shelly Duvall’s peculiar performance) into generally rather normal people, and instead has the very normal kids in Victor’s class become a series of nods to horror tropes. There’s the boy who looks like Karloff as Frankenstein’s Monster and has a great scene or two resurrecting ‘Colossus’, but little else. Then there’s the boy in the Igor role, who is quite adorable. There’s the wide-eyed, staring, creepy girl with a psychic cat who I was a little sad didn’t get closure to her story, especially since she lost her constant companion. There was the fat boy who brings sea monkeys to life, which seem to be a Gremlins tribute. Then there’s the somewhat offensively-stereotyped Japanese boy, who the makers have clearly attempted to distance from tokenism by making him talented in a variety of fields, but really only has that thick accent so that there can later be a Godzilla/Gamera parody. It makes sense, given the fleshed-out story, but somehow the slightly unsettling home life set against a very ordinary school life gave just the right atmosphere of weird-twee-suburbia that Edward Scissorhands gets so right, but this now lacks.

Also, strangely, the visuals just aren’t as striking. The film nails shadows on walls – there’s no doubt about that. The Corpse Bride-like designs for the puppets work, but are often a little stiff, and the more grotesque characters have distractingly brilliant mouth movements. But somehow, the angle of that shot with pet graves on a hill doesn’t ring as true, and the cuts with the angry mobs and the fire don’t quite seem to evoke the old Hammer films. It’s all almost perfect, but not quite there.

But this is a harsh review, mostly because I had high hopes. It remains a very enjoyable and well-made film. It just wasn’t quite all I hoped it would be. 

The Nightmare Before Christmas / Tim Burton’s Nightmare Before Christmas

Some of the impressions I’ve been writing lately have been a long time coming because it’s taken me ages to finish watching things. This one is overdue just because I haven’t gotten around to it, deciding I wanted to wait for a repeat viewing – which is also the case for director Henry Selick’s James and the Giant Peach.

What’s that? Henry who? Wasn’t the director here Tim Burton? Well, as a matter of fact, no – it wasn’t. Yes, it has his trademark atmospherics, his cheerfully grim style, music from Danny Elfman (vocal performances too) and even says ‘Tim Burton’s Nightmare Before Christmas’ in the posters. But while he was the creative force behind the project’s inception, served as the producer and came up with the story (based on a poem he had written), he neither directed the piece nor wrote the screenplay. After all, he is a director of live-action films, not a creator of stop-motion – though he did go on to co-direct The Corpse Bride. The credit here, however, goes to Selick, later to gain more recognition as the director of Coraline and currently under the employ of Pixar and working on a new film before being lined up to adapt a Neil Gaiman novel.

This is not a case of either-or, however: both men deserve considerable credit for creating this very fine piece of work. Along with Aardman, this 1993 work sent new life coursing through stop-motion animation, which had been foundering since 1986’s creepy but iconic The Adventures of Mark Twain. Its brilliantly distinctive aesthetic showed that CG was not going to entirely replace this branch of the art form, and in every way – concept, characters, music, pacing, believable antagonist and even progression of its romance – it is a good, solid, memorable film. And while Burton has always come down heavily on talk of a direct sequel, the world has remained an attractive one, appearing, for example, in the Kingdom Hearts games. For while this was seen as a little too risky to be released as a Disney animation, it comes from the studio’s Touchstone imprint – which probably helped it at the time, for while Disney was making excellent films like The Lion King, they weren’t exactly associated with quirky, edgy, dark work at the time, and if anything the stigma of Disney being safe and cute could have lost Nightmare a chunk of its audience.

The story is based on one of the more popular modern takes on Christmas: someone who is not a typical Christmas figure intruding onto the joy and brightness of Christmas and ruining it. Unlike a Grinch or a rampaging South Park snowman, here Jack Skellington has mostly good intentions. He is The Pumpkin King, leading the horror-themed inhabitants of the gleefully German Expressionist Halloween Town, and once he glimpses the gaudy holiday happiness of Christmas Town, he is infatuated and wants to be able to do the same thing – even going so far as to kidnap Santa himself to take his place. Of course, things don’t go to plan and as it turns out, you can’t just usurp Father Christmas – especially with the chaotic madman Oogie Boogie setting his eyes on Santa and Jack’s love interest Sally. His motivation is ultimately a little dubious, but he’s so charismatic and visually striking that this can only be considered a minor quibble. He is cruel for the sake of cruelty, because that’s the sort of character he is.

Brilliant visually, clever in how it can make characters at one repulsive and appealing to look at, and delivered with great belief and a fantastic aesthetic, it’s no wonder it was such a hit – and has become a neatly alternative Christmas classic.