The Corpse Bride

Tim Burton's exploration of victoriana-gothic was always going to veer into stop motion territory at some point - Burton's first film was a short stop-motion film called Frankenweenie and he later produced and had creative input in the cult classic The Nightmare Before Christmas. It's somewhat surprising then that The Corpse Bride should feel like such a minor work; running at just 72 minutes, covering much of the same material as Burton's previous films, and not really going anywhere all that surprising at any point. It's also oddly macabre for something assumedly aimed at kids, and yet too simplistic for something that might cater solely for adults.

Johnny Depp plays Victor, a nervous Sleepy Hollow-ish British gentleman who accidentally betroths himself to Emily (Helena Bonham-Carter), a once-jilted corpse bride who is elated by her new husband. But Victor is meant to marry Victoria (Emily Watson), the good-hearted daughter of despicably snobbish parents, and he finds himself unable to return to the world of the living without bringing his newfound friends of the underworld in tow.

There are flashes of ingeniousness throughout The Corpse Bride that hint at a better film... at times it feels like it might be quite subversive for an alleged kids' movie. The existence of a jolly jazz underworld suggests that there isn't a heaven or a hell, and the reaction of Christopher Lee's nasty priest character to Victor's predicament seems to confirm the irrelevance of the church. Burton isn't willing to go so far though, with the ending suggesting a more traditional view of the afterlife.

The overall look of the film is of a stylised Dickensian world inhabited by spindly-limbed near-grotesque characters in a blue-grey landscape, but this then gloriously shifts into a Mexican day-of-the-dead feel for the underworld sequences with typically Burtonesque contrast achieved through brighter colours. Victor's awakening in the underworld is the first point where greens, reds and other vibrant colurs are introduced into the colour palette. The ending too - where the dead walk the Earth - is a fun and moving subversion of gothic convention.

Unfortunately though, The Corpse Bride feels like a short film stretched as closely to feature-length as possible. Burton just can't sustain the energy levels needed to keep a feature-length stop-motion film in the air. At times it comes across as a bit too BBC kids-TV, and it lacks the verve of The Nightmare Before Christmas or the more recent Coraline. The rotting corpses and skeletons are a good laugh, and the all-star cast have fun disguising their voices with outlandish accents, but it isn't anything special and it never evolves beyond something we'd routinely expect from Tim Burton.