TIM BURTON’S CORPSE BRIDE ***1/2 (out of ****) Featuring the voice of Johnny Depp, Helena Bonham Carter, Emily Watson, Albert Finney, and Michael Gough Directed by Tim Burton and Mark Johnson & written by John August, Pamela Pettler, and Caroline Thompson 2005 76 min PG Yes, you weren’t the only one who thought Jack Skellington’s zombie girlfriend in “The Nightmare Before Christmas” was hot.  Now there’s a whole movie about that. “Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride” presents death as the ultimate arranged marriage:  you can’t get out of it, so you’d better get accustomed to the idea.  The movie is a return for Burton to the lovely stop-motion (actually, it’s go-motion) clay world of “The Nightmare Before Christmas.”  It’s all ghouls, ghosts, skeletons, half-decayed corpses, forests of gnarled branches, and spooky worm-eaten houses, all decked out in the colors of Halloween.  Its two main locations are an Eastern European city (think Prague—the hero looks just like Kafka anyway), done up in a sooty, oppressive monotone, and the land of the dead, all blues, greens, and purples, as lively as it is shadowy.  The living squander life on propriety and formality while the dead are the ultimate bohemians.  When the hero’s living betrothed tells her mother that the hero came into her room with a zombie, the mother can only shriek in horror “there was a man in your room without a chaperone?!” Bouncy and loveably idiotic caricatures populate both places:  the town crier is shaped like a bell, the faithful old maid is bent into a question mark, the bride’s father is as round as his wife is tall, etc.  Through a twist of fate that I’ll leave the movie to reveal, our Kafka-esque arranged groom (voiced by Johnny Depp) suddenly finds himself married, not to the woman his parents choose, but to a blue-skinned and rotting bride from beyond the grave.  The ensuing love triangle, involving both women (Emily Watson and Helena Bonham Carter), is a witty scamper on both sides of the grave, resulting in a town infested by the dead.  What begins as threatening turns into a touching reunion between the living and the decaying, like a Day of the Dead celebration. The songs, co-written by Danny Elfman, are the best kind of musical numbers:  they advance plot instead of repeat it.  But don’t let the animation and the songs fool you:  “Corpse Bride” isn’t a typical children’s movie.  It’s not all noise and screaming and pop culture one-liners to keep parents from getting bored, like all the trailers we saw in the theater, minutes BEFORE “Corpse Bride” started.  Burton’s film may have the wide-eyed innocence and clean storytelling lines associated with children, but it is also a film of quiet moments and free of irony and sarcasm.  When the groom sits down to play a variation of “Moonlight Sonata” on piano and our gaze lingers patiently on his fingers, each one meticulously animated to get the exact right key, I knew I was in for something special.  I smiled from the beginning of “Corpse Bride” to the very end. Finished Sunday, October 23rd, 2005 Copyright © 2005 Friday & Saturday Night                                                                                                         Back to home.