Tim Burton's latest offers pure necrophiliac confectionary.
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Corpse Bride
's story feels eerily familiar, as though it's an adaptation of an old half-remembered European fairy tale. Victor Van Dort (voiced by Johnny Depp) is a sensitive, bashful young man whose nouveau riche parents (Tracey Ullman and Paul Whitehouse) seek to marry into gentry by affecting a liasion between their son and Victoria Everglot (Emily Watson), an equally timid and poetically souled young thing whose parents, Lady and Lord Everglot (Joanna Lumley and Albert Finney), dripping with nobility but utterly penniless, are equally eager for the arranged marriage to take place. Victor and Victoria (whose names persist in reminding one of a Blake Edwards film) have their doubts, but once they meet, they're completely smitten.
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Cast from the wedding rehearsal by a thunderous minister (Christopher Lee), the bumbling Victor retires to the woods, determined to perfect his delivery of his wedding vows. As he forcefully utters the final words of the ceremony, he slides the wedding ring onto the branch of a tree-only it's actually the skeletal finger of the Corpse Bride (Helena Bonham Carter), once known above ground as Emily, a young woman jilted on the eve of her wedding by an evil groom who only wanted her fortune. Doomed to wait forever for the return of her faithless lover, Emily seizes on this opportunity for eternal wedded bliss-and on Victor, determinedly hauling the panicky young man below decks and introducing him to the surprisingly colorful realm of the passed-on. Can Victor persuade her to let him return to the land of the living to wed his true love before her scheming parents marry her off to sinister Lord Barkis (Richard E Grant)? Or will he linger with the decidedly perkier undead until, well, death do him part?
Corpse Bride
continues the now-established tradition of having animated characters blatantly resemble their voice actors; though Victor looks more like Hugh Grant as Chopin in
Impromptu
, with floppy hair and pale Byronic brow. It's possible to completely forget that these aren't live-action performances. Emily, the Corpse Bride herself, disarmingly attractive in a cadaverous sort of way, is a lot more lively than many overpaid actresses which come to mind. We'd probably be rooting for her more strenuously if Victoria didn't suddenly reveal a startling level of spunk herself. Except for her, everything in the parallel above-ground world is rather grisly, grey and sexually repressed, whereas down below it's all surrealist and Luis Buñuel, Dia de los Muertos, "Guernica" and somehow oddly Caribbean. "Why would you want to go up there when people are dying to get down here?" one deceased gentleman asks Victor plaintively; and you take his point.
All necrophilia jokes aside, you really wouldn't blame Victor if he decided to relocate permanently, especially given the babelicious Emily (so, okay, she's got visible bone structure; but she's a hell of a pianist). Emily definitely gets the best lines, and the scene in which she takes her revenge on her jilting groom manages to be both blood-curdling and hilarious. In the end
Corpse Bride
may be Burton's love song to his wife Bonham Carter-and a testament to the power of devotion to transform living death into vitality.
