Corpse Bride

I think pretty near every person who goes to see this film in the first few days will have viewed Tim Burton's previous stop-motion triumph, the 1993 cult classic The Nightmare Before Christmas. And as probably one of the biggest Tim Burton fans out there, I of course had as well, and had lofty expectations of the follow up, Corpse Bride. This time around the animation looks a lot smoother, and the whole film has a glossier, smoothed edge quality to it, which can be accredited to the much higher budget for Corpse Bride and the improved techniques in the art of stop motion. I thought it didn't make the film any better, but it certainly wasn't any worse, just kind of different. The artistic vision of Tim is so obvious, the bizarre and wonderfully unique characters are in no short supply, and the sets and visual design of the characters looks like something out of Burton's trademark quasi-gothic nightmare world. In a brilliant decision, the living world is done entirelly in shades of grey, lacking in almost every colour. But when the hero, Viktor, reaches the land of the dead, everything is colourful and lively. A motif we've seen before in Beetlejuice. Essentially the film is visually perfect, as is everyone of Tim's films. The question then remains how does the story, characters, music, rank next to it's masterful predecessor? Story wise, it's unique and somewhat clever but lacking the simple poetic genius of Nightmare. The characters are fantastic, maybe not quite as memorable as Nightmare, but with enough viewing you could definitely begin to quote characters in everyday life. The music is where the film really pales in comparison to Nightmare Before Christmas, Elfman is totally off his game and delivers a couple very weak and instantly forgettable tunes that hinder the movie rather than entertain the audience. While Corpse Bride's bright characters and visual gags are plenty to keep the movie entertaining, for some reason named John August the script ran into the same problems as the summer's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. It refused to be a passive player and insisted on cliche one liners, desperate for jokes that were totally unnecessary. The movie and the situational is hilarious without all the written jokes. But that being said they weren't all bad, especially "there is an eye, in my soup" which had me slapping my knee, kind of a Family Guy style random humour. Winding this down, the film doesn't hold a candle to Nightmare Before Christmas, but it's fresh, funny, bold, and original. In other words, everything Hollywood's been missing latelly, thus it is a welcome addition to the dreary 2005 lineup of movies.