Corpse Bride

Corpse Bride – Tim Burton – A stop motion animation that suffered greatly from being seen shortly after the, far superior, Coraline. Featuring an irritatingly bland Jonny Depp as the voice of Viktor and a Burton’s standard role for Helena Bonham Carter. Harrowingly uninspired. Apart from the voice of Albert Finney, attached to a figure that looks like an unfortunate John Prescott caricature, flattened in the wrong ratio, there is little to recommend here. (Recommending Albert Finney as an unintentional John Prescott, in a gothic animation, seems a must.) The corpse bride herself, played by Bonham Carter, is a busty, blue and cadaverously anorexic counterpoint to the demure and buttoned up, original bride. There is something unsettling and even reflective of our unhealthy celebrity worship about the depiction of the ‘corpse bride’: the dark allure of infidelity played by a gaunt and impossibly breasted, wide-eyed doll-like creature…behold the manufactured fantasy of today! If the film was any good, it might be possible to frame this as an interesting and conscious critique; unfortunately the film is not good. It is an insipid, unimaginative, undeveloped and lazy Burton venture (at least as far as new and engaging ideas are concerned, sadly the painstaking reality of stop-motion means this film was probably anything but lazy… meticulously crafted boredom) on automatic pilot. Not even the Tom Waitsian blues of dancing of skeletons could make amends for this lumbering crypt of undead puns, dead vocal performances and flat lining screenplay. 3/10