Back in 2005, Corpse Bride was Tim Burton returning to something like creative first principles after a run of expensive live-action features (1999's Sleepy Hollow, 2001's Planet of the Apes, 2003's Big Fish, arguably even the same year's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory) that hadn't sparked into quite as much life as everybody had hoped. Burton had made his money; now he did one for love, or for art at least. This was stopmotion, overseen by Mike Johnson (who'd worked on 1993's The Nightmare Before Christmas and 1996's James and the Giant Peach) for the newly emergent Laika, the Pixar rivals with the highest quality control; the voicecast drew on Burton's fetish actors (Johnny Depp, Helena Bonham Carter, Michael Gough, with assists from Paul Whitehouse, Richard E. Grant and Albert Finney); the songs, of course, arrived care of Danny Elfman. It opens with a simple image, drawn from close personal experience: a pallid, nervy young man - the Depp-voiced Victor Van Dort - sketching alone at his desk. This weakling aesthete is in the process of being strongarmed by an overbearing mother (Tracey Ullman) into wedding a society belle (Emily Watson); yet stammering through a rehearsal of his vows in a cemetery, he accidentally draws the attentions of the lovelorn, maggot-eaten revenant of the title (Bonham Carter) and finds himself an accidental necrophile, newly entangled in a paranormal throuple. Amazingly, the film went out in matinee slots with a PG certificate, providing a generation of tots with their first introduction to this filmmaker's long-held fear of the conventional; two decades on, it plays as to Burton what Phantom Thread was to Paul Thomas Anderson, offering as much neurotic self-critique as spooky half-term fun.
For their part, the Laika artisans lent Burton's imaginings a melancholy beauty, as distinct from the more festive, Disney-backed Nightmare. The Bride, clad in her Havisham-like dress, turns circles in the moonlight; spectral footsteps left behind in the snow cue an inevitable "cold feet" joke. Savings were made on modelling clay: the film's Victoriana is set out in some version of black and white, and only when Victor breaches the underworld does the screen explode in juke-joint greens, purples and reds, anticipating the Day of the Dead tones of the later The Book of Life and Coco. There's only one world Burton wants to live in, and it ain't the one up top. Six feet under, limbs unscrew themselves, bodies split in two, and a worm assumes the voice of Peter Lorre; everything's mobile and flexible here, and nothing's as visibly set in stone as it is in polite society. If Elfman's score doesn't match the high bar the composer set for himself with Nightmare (nor, indeed, Burton's use of music in Beetlejuice), there are still moments of loveliness, like a harmonium duet for detachable hands. Even forgiving cinephiles would have to admit Burton's been variable this century; that he retains the goodwill he does is partly been down to his ability to balance out the impersonal business of IP renewal the studio system is now set up to facilitate (such as 2010's Alice in Wonderland and 2019's Dumbo) with pet projects like this and 2012's Frankenweenie. The Bride surely informed Monica Bellucci's ghoulish apparition in last year's Beetlejuice Beetlejuice: part scream queen, part (bad) dreamgirl. Kids will continue to thrill to the original as the nights draw in; for accompanying adults, this is the film that explains the most about Burton's dating habits in the years since.
Corpse Bride is now showing in cinemas nationwide.
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