Corpse Bride (2005)

Two prominent families have arranged for their children to be married in order to overcome financial difficulties. As the objects of betrothal, Victor (Okay, for Kim, Everybody now, Mmmmmm... Johnny Depp) and Victoria (Emily Watson) met for the first time the night before their wedding. It only makes sense that Victor, a groom with cold feet, would have trouble remembering tedious wedding vows. Thus Victor ends up in the dark forest ringing his hands and muttering his vows on a cold dark night, the moon is full, the stars are bright and the forest is a little bit creepy. Wandering through the black mangled trees, Victor just can't memorize his wedding vows. Victor's hesitance towards marriage causes him to jumble the words. The Corpse Bride hears the vows, bringing her out of the grave. Blue-tinted, eye-ball-popping, maggot-infested beauty Emily (Helena Bonham Carter) has become known as the Corpse Bride after waiting for her fiance where the couple planned to rendezvous before getting hitched. When her groom arrives, he kills her, and she rests in the ground to wait for her soul mate, whether he knows he is the Corpse Bride's groom or not. Victor suddenly finds himself married to another woman, a voluptuous bombshell bride who also happens to be dead. Whisked away to the Land of the Dead, Victor finds out that living amongst corpses is not as easy as it seems. Heads easily loose their owners and eyes never seem to stay in their sockets, an adjustment that Victor seems reluctant to accept. Once taken into the Land of the Dead, it is nearly impossible to return, causing Victor to choose between risking Victoria's life or giving up his own. Hilarity ensues.

Trivia: The puppets were made from stainless steel armatures covered with silicone skin. This is the first feature to be made with commercial digital still photography cameras (31 Canon EOS-1Ds MARK II SLR cameras with Nikon Lenses) instead of film cameras. As an indication of the painstaking nature of stop-motion animation, it took the animators 28 separate shots to make the bride blink. The puppets used neither of the industry standards of replaceable heads (like those used on The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993)) or replaceable mouths (like those used by Aardman Studios in Wallace & Gromit in The Curse of the Were-Rabbit (2005)) but instead used precision crafted clockwork heads, adjusted by hidden keys. This allowed for unprecedented subtlety, but was apparently even more painstaking than the already notoriously arduous animation. One animator even reported having recurring nightmares of adjusting his own facial expression in this fashion. The puppets were two feet tall and some of the stages were so large that animators could actually fit through the set doors with minimal crouching. Multiple, identical puppets had to be created so that more scenes could be accomplished in a shorter period of time. In all, fourteen puppets of the Bride and Victor were created, and thirteen were created of Victoria.

Well, Kim called it. She figured since I reviewed The Nightmare Before Christmas by Tim Burton that Corpse Bride wouldn't be far behind and she was right. This was a great movie too. Again, the characters was very well defined. I thought it was very interesting because of the positioning of the worlds, the Land of the Living above, think upper class, and the Land of the Dead, think lower class, but then Burton gives the land of the dead a warmer friendlier feel, while making the land of the living sterile. He does this by giving the land of the dead vibrant colors and characters, while the land of the living is drab and lifeless (very few characters other then the main ones are seen, while the land of the dead is full of vibrant characters). Basically, the land of the living seems to be dead and the land of the dead is living life to the fullest. Fun film. Below you will see an example, to the left is the land of the living, to the right is the land of the dead. Click on the pictures to see them bigger.