CORPSE BRIDE review

Damn I love THE CORPSE BRIDE! I’ve known of the old Russian Folk Tale of THE CORPSE BRIDE for quite a while – and when I heard they were adapting it into a feature film, I was genuinely curious how they would pad, what is essentially a one page story into a feature length film.

Now sure, it’s only just a bit over an hour – but many of my favorite movies are as brief as this. All those Sherlock Holmes flicks with Basil Rathbone, those wonderful Universal horror films… Wonderfully brief. No wasted moments. Unusually elegant in their story-telling. All of this can also be said of CORPSE BRIDE.

From the very first shots of the film, I began to just be delighted. It was more than the beautiful Edward Gorey-esque black & white three dimensional ink-washed world. It was more than the giddy bits of fun I was taking from Danny Elfman’s opening song. The true brilliance on display here was the physical animation and character work I was watching.

Take the animation of Finnis Everglot, the short squatty man with the bizarre waddle gait and the odd as could be half crazed sense of urgency to his every motion. Whomever was the principle animator of this character – that created his motion – is a genius. It is hilarious to see move. At some levels he reminded me ever so slightly of Tik-Tok from RETURN TO OZ. That the voice coming from the inky black maw of this strange creation was the cantankerous timbre of Albert Finney, and he soars from this squatty figure.

The movie is filled with character actors voiced by great actors. The quirky bizarre citizenry of the Land of the Living are delightful in how they exist within their own repressed rules of living. They’re the perfect parody of the world of Jane Austen or that of the Bronte sisters. It’s actually very fascinating what they did here. They did the stop-motion dolls in a very Eastern European look, while placing them in a Russian Jewish Folktale that had been taken to a very Victorian feeling world.

Meanwhile the Land of the Dead is far more Dia de Los Muertos. Which is borne out of Mexico – about as far away from Victorian sensibilities or Eastern European Jewish Folklore… But then the musical rhythms and melodies that Danny Elfman partly mined for the sumptuous music throughout is a bit of that Eastern European Gypsy music, not quite punked out the way Gogol Bordello swings it, but in that best way that Elfman does. This hodge-podge of sensibilities and cultural smorgasbord made this just fantastic.

Watching this, you can see tributes to Wah Chang, Harryhausen, Peter Lorre, Cab Calloway, Fleischer’s Boop and Walt Disney’s Silly Symphonies – in particular SKELETON DANCE.

When I first saw the design of the Corpse Bride character, I have to admit that I thought the character looked a bit too much like Sally from NIGHTMARE BEFORE CHRISTMAS. However, in motion and in the film I was struck with an odd cross of Barbara Steele, Betty Boop and Sally. After she’s risen from the ground – and she does her elegant, slow stalk of Victor – those fixed eyes and the slow push and the soft warm focus on the cool blues of her face… I flashed to Barbara Steele – only her hips moved like Boop’s. She’s far more voluptuous than Sally’s more mousy maid de la macabre, but the Corpse Bride’s grace was entrancing. I never imagined that I’d see a more graceful stop-motion being than Sally, but her walk was like a graceful stumble in comparison.

Her story was so appealing. The love trumped girl murdered in the woods abandoned by her husband, never to have ever truly loved. Perhaps killed by forced, but ruled by heart-ache. Her story is so sad and sympathetic, that you actually root for the unholy union to rule the day, but…

Victor’s story with Victoria is also simply laid out and simply beautiful. These are a pair from a period of arrangement, repression and sad unions that often wound up stuck in a loveless hell for the entirety of their living existence. Only – upon Victor and Victoria’s first meeting between the two came a piano & music. This was the first of two fantastic scenes involving a piano. This one was about music arousing passions in Victoria that she always dreamt she’d feel… and in her face, Victor found the passion he had always hoped for. In his excitement – his nervousness… he fumbles his vows… And who could blame him? He’s only just met the woman he’s supposed to marry… Oh, and did I mention that the good Pastor Galswells – the man to whom he’s making his vows – is voiced by CHRISTOPHER LEE! Scary doesn’t touch it? When Dracula, Saruman and… well, let’s face it, it’s Christopher Lee – I don’t think there is a scarier voice of absolute authority in the known world. Well – poor Victor runs to gather his thoughts, to get a hold of his nerves.

In the woods, as he’s walking around – he’s decided to go through with it. He’s only asking himself why he’s hesitating. I mean, Victoria’s soul is that of Emily Watson – one of the most wonderful souls from a town out west known for being the place where people without souls resides. I don’t know about you, but I’ve been falling, schoolboy fashion, in love with Emily Watson and her characters ever since I first saw her in BREAKING THE WAVES. Here – her voice belongs to a doll that seems to effortlessly blush and hope. You can see in her the hope to be everything that her mother and father aren’t. She wants to love, to have music and delights. She doesn’t want to be hidden away in the cavernous shadows of this grand empty home. Upon her shoulders has been the weight of her family’s future. This wedding means her family will continue to have its prominence, but really – that’s secondary for her. She wants love. And in Victor’s musical fingertips – she dares to hope for a true love. Someone that want more than titles. Someone that dares to dream of more.

Just as Victor has the fire to sincerely give the vows – he, in a jocular gesture places the ring on what he thinks is a bony looking twig – upon the completion of his vows – the earth vomits up the Corpse Bride.

Now, what I found downright miraculous about this film is that this is handled quite creepily. I mean, while the Corpse Bride is a stunningly beautiful haunted image… her veil flowing like Shelly Winters’ hair in the bottom of the river from NIGHT OF THE HUNTER – yet the expression is very Psychotronic in that Barbara Steele kinda way. That her veil is done with stop-motion is truly one of the great triumphs of animation. In the days of Harryhausen – it would have been nigh impossible – it would have require painstaking wire painting that Ray was famous for doing, but… the number of wire required to steady these long flowing fragile cloth… would require patience that might have even been beyond Ray’s infinite patience to paint out. For this film, obviously they’ve digitally removed them – a technique that Ray could have only prayed for in his many films. The results allowed a flowing beauty – that was just awesome. Flowing not at any natural speed, but my god it’s a beautiful motion.

Now – let’s talk about the Land of the Dead. Living in Austin – we not only have a fantastic celebration of Halloween each year, but there’s a huge adherence to the old ways of Mexico. We celebrate many of their holidays – my favorite of which is Dia De Los Muertos… Painting one’s self to look skeletal. But as a boy with my parents, they introduced me to the greatest of the skeletal artists… A political satirist named Posada, whose Mexican Revolutionary art pictured a mirror world of the revolution with the joyous dead. The revolutionary dead, the tortilla woman dead, the little boy dead, the general dead, the bartender dead. Skeletons with hairstyles and fashion statements. Skeletons with style and a continuance of one’s living life unto death.

In the Land of the Dead of the film – the filmmaker’s have taken Posada’s vision and brought it to life in a very silly symphony fashion. Here, the sword that stabbed through the dwarf general still lays there. The cannonball entry and exit would still fixed in the empty ribs and cloths of the candlebar mustached military skeleton. It’s bright, colorful and unrestrained… as if to say that the repression of life will not follow you unto death. It’s a beautiful idea – that in death one finds the freedom that perhaps one’s living reality never gave you. In an interesting macabre sense of heaven, I suppose it is a delight.

What’s great though is that Victor is afraid of it all upon first being faced with it. I mean, here’s a character that had just decided what his future would be, and now he’s asked to love and be married to yet another woman, only in this case her beauty is enhanced by a maggot with the soul of Peter Lorre. A maggoty Jiminy Cricket if you will. Great character. This is definitely the most obviously entertaining portion of the film, and definitely it is to be loved, but with the exception of one dual piano playing scene of sheer genius – there is little of the emotional subtlety that you find in the Land of the Living.

When the two lands meet though – this is the great genius of the film. In June of this year, I reviewed a DVD of a French “Zombie” film called LES REVENANTS aka THEY CAME BACK. This film hit us with a totally different horror… Not of flesh eating undead, but of the departed merely returning and wanting their lives back. Here – the filmmakers do something similar. Here the dead have returned for a joyous occasion. The living, of course freak out, but slowly recognize the departed. This is used for not only emotional impact, but also comedic and it is done to perfection.

My favorite scene in here is when the undead and the living move towards the church and Christopher Lee’s Pastor is desperately trying to hold back the unholy forces of the undead. There’s something so wonderful about this that I could just barely stand the giddiness that it made me feel.

The look and feel of the film is magic. Why do I love stop-motion animation so? To me, it is how God would play with toys, he’d give them life. That is what stop-motion animators do, they give life to toys. It is magic and this film is amazing. I love the film wholly. The physical animation itself is masterful. The design is fantastic. And lastly, in the best fashion of adaptation – a fairy tale, a rather macabre one – has been turned into a work of cinematic entertainment with beauty, elegance and heart… something too rare these days.

There is no sense of the MODERN here. At no point do you think, 2005. It is a timeless tale of fancy. One to be cherished. Fantastic job!