Tim Burton's
Corpse Bride is an animated (well, stop action photography with puppets, along with various special effects) fairy tale that falls somewhere between Tim Burton's
A Nightmare Before Christmas, and Tim Burton's
Every Other Movie with Weird Characters Doing Weird Things in a Weird Place. The story is sweet and a little bit touching, the visuals are amazing and inventive, and the characters are alienated and sweet and misunderstood. And like in every other Tim Burton movie, we found ourselves nodding off as the "plot" wandered aimlessly, while giving us absolutely no reason to care one way or the other.
To the deceptive scores:
Corpse Bride, 2005
Script/Story: 6
Acting/Casting: 6
Action: 4
Humor: 5
Horror: 4
Eye Candy: 8
Fun Factor: 2
Replayability: 4
Overall: 4.5
I'm torn on my scores for this one, since this isn't a movie I disliked, or thought was poorly done in any way. Plus most reviewers seem to adore it, judging by the
82% rating it's got on Rotten Tomatoes.
It wasn't bad. The visuals and sets were great, the stop action worked very well most of the time (some of the fast movements and floating of cloth were distractingly-jerky), and the plot was coherent. It was just... boring. Malaya nodded off twice in the middle, and we were both thankful it ran a mercifully brief 76 minutes. (And let us not speak of the pre-movie trailers, which were all stupid trailers for horrible family crap like
Cheaper by the Dozen 2.)
As I said in the intro, it's every Tim Burton movie. The characters were the same misfit outcasts with hearts of gold, the setting was bizarre and disturbing, yet perfectly normal to the people living in it, the visuals were great, and the plot was slow, uncompelling, and pretty much beside the point. We didn't think much of the music either; there weren't many songs in the film, and they weren't very long, but that was a good thing since they weren't catchy or fun or funny. I'm not much on musicals, but I didn't mind and even sort of enjoyed the musical numbers in Burton's version of
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Not so with
Corpse Bride.
I may add to this review in the future, but I'm keeping it short for now, and reviewing this like I think they should review music CDs.
I can't recommend it, but neither am I saying you should not see it.
Look, you've seen other films by Tim Burton. If you liked the visuals and imagery and concept of movies like
Edward Scissorhands,
Sleepy Hollow,
The Nightmare Before Christmas, and
Batman Returns enough to enjoy the films despite their slow, wandering, absurd and frequently boring plots, then you'll probably feel the same about
Corpse Bride. If you were bored by those others, you'll be just as bored in
Corpse Bride. Know thyself.
I'd have been perfectly happy to wait and see this on DVD, though I would have been bored then too, and regretted buying it. I think this film would be best seen about 15 minutes at a time, since the enjoyable visuals and the awesome skeleton puppets would get you through that much of it, and when you started to get bored as nothing of importance happened, you could stop it and do something else. And when you returned to the film a day later, it would be fun again.
