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| the corpse bride
Twelve years ago, having relaunched a certain franchise with Batman Returns, Tim Burton treated himself to his first full-length animated feature, The Nightmare Before Christmas, which was directed by Henry Selick. Burton produced, but his skewed view of the world can be found all over this tale of how Jack Skellington, King of Halloween, took over Christmas Town and made things go a little bit wrong with the festive season.Three years later, Burton and Selick teamed again on James and the Giant Peach, another animated story based - nearly a decade before Charlie - on one of Roald Dahl’s books. Again, the technique used was that of ‘stop-motion’ animation, a painstaking system of moving model figures a fraction of an inch between one frame and the next. You shoot a single frame, move the model a fraction, shoot another frame, and so on… for months. The Corpse Bride is Burton’s third stop-motion feature, and the tiny movements were being made at Three Mile Studios in East London while, several miles to the west, Burton and a group of live actors were shooting Charlie. Not surprisingly, there’s quite a bit of overlap between the two films. The lead voices in Corpse Bride are provided by Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter, who play Willie Wonka and Charlie’s mother respectively. The production design is again by Alex McDowell. And the music, of course, is by Danny Elfman, who has scored virtually every Burton movie. The director this time is, however, a newcomer: Mike Johnson, who was a rigger on Nightmare and an animator on James. 
And the story? Well, that’s by another pair of regular Burton collaborators - John August, who wrote Charlie and Big Fish; and Caroline Thompson, who wrote Edward Scissorhands and Nightmare - plus Pamela Pettler, who co-wrote the Spielberg/Zemeckis collaboration, Monster House, which is due out next summer.The story they wrote is about Victor, who is on the verge of marrying his sweetheart, Victoria, despite the opposition of her aristocratic but penniless parents. But Victor makes such a mess of the wedding rehearsal, even setting his future mother-in-law’s dress on fire, that the pastor sends him off to learn his lines. He wanders miserably into the woods, does a rehearsal all on his own, and pops his wedding ring onto the root of a tree. But the bony protuberance isn’t a root at all: it’s the finger of the Corpse Bride, and Victor is whisked away to the underworld with his new wife. It’s not all doom and gloom, though: Victor lives in (surprise, surprise) Victorian England, and the land of the dead is in many ways more fun than the land of the living. But Victoria is Victor’s true sweetheart, and love will find a way… |
