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Sweetly spooky, Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride proves that you don’t need computer animation to create an original and entertaining animated film. Corpse Bride’s plot is amazingly simple – a milquetoast of a bridegroom accidentally proposes to a long-dead phantom, who gleefully accepts his offer – but its meticulous stop-motion animation is well worth noting.
Many casual viewers might assume Corpse Bride is yet another computer-animated film due to the 3-D nature of the characters and sets. In actuality, virtually everything in Corpse Bride is a miniature model, hand-animated pose-by-pose. Similar techniques were used by both George Pal and Ray Harryhausen, among many others, and stop-motion animation used to be a fairly common special effect in Hollywood films. While computer animation is capable of some truly dazzling and ethereal effects, it just can’t touch stop-motion when it comes to capturing complex textures and intricate, realistic lighting. All the characters, from the undead skeletons and zombies to the goblin-like living, look real because they are real. I suspect that we don’t see stop-motion much anymore because the technique is labor-intensive, and its reputation has often been sullied by too many low budget sci-fi films and Rankin-Bass TV specials.
Most of the best scenes in the film involve Emily, the Corpse Bride herself. Voiced by Helena Bonham Carter, Emily is melancholy in a way that only Victorian-era ghosts can be. At first glance, she seems attractive enough (even if she has blue skin), but on closer examination it’s obvious that she is indeed a corpse. One of her arms is completely stripped to the bone, and she tends to pop an eyeball out of a socket from time to time. She’s depressed because she was cheated of happiness in her lifetime, and unlike the rest of her fellow undead she hasn’t truly made peace with her death. By the film’s end, she learns enough about herself to mature more fully, and shows considerable character development for the lead character in an American animated production. Emily is definitely far more interesting than any of the living characters, who are mostly unattractively grotesque caricatures of the nouveau-rich and corrupt aristocrats. Even Victor, the shy and pencil-thin groom, doesn’t attract our sympathies like Emily does. Given Tim Burton’s poor track record for creating plausible female characters, Emily is a welcome exception.
It’s rather sad that Corpse Bride was overlooked by the 2006 Academy Awards, but its lack of official acclaim will probably help it foster a well-deserved cult reputation.
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