With his new stop-motion animation project called ’Corpse Bride’ director Tim Burton attempts, yet again, to exercise his talent for creating something that is macabre, funny, dark, intriguing and challenging.
Apart from being a successful director/producer Burton is also an artist who enjoys drawing, and his films often involve a highly imaginative visualization of the bizarre surroundings his stories happen to be about.
Set against the times of 19th century Europe, the movie takes ample advantage of the backdrop to add flavor and richness to the dialog and lyrics, both of which are replete with puns and contextual humor.
The technical brilliance involving animation with puppets is compelling enough to make one forget that it is not a feature film one is watching. Johny Depp, Helena Bonham Carter, Emily Watson, Christopher Lee, and others excel in how they bring the necessary realism, lending their voices to the puppets. By choosing to use monochromatic colors to represent the living and a full set of colors to show the world of the dead, Tim Burton goes for the extra sarcasm the scheme brings to the visualization.
It is a quirky romantic tale of a reluctant groom, who while practicing his vows, ends up proposing to the wrong woman, a corpse, and in the process gets abducted into the world of the dead. But the movie is more about the visual treatment of the content than what happens in the story after that.
As much as one ends up enjoying and commending the project, one can’t help wishing that Tim Burton ventured to apply his skills, and his passion for visualization, to something much wider, more appealing, and far reaching - perhaps something even bigger in scope than the ’Batman’ franchise that he initiated a while ago.