Corpse Bride

The old saw about the dancing poodle often leaps (or dances) to my mind: "It's not how well he dances, but that he dances at all." While I enjoyed "Corpse Bride" very much, I kept wondering when we were going to get past the dancing poodle of stop-motion animation and get to the real meat of the thing.

"Corpse Bride" is a Tim Burton movie, which (by definition) implies the creation of an artistic universe in which unexplained randomly dark elements exist; in which primary attention is paid to the art of the thing and secondary (or lower) attention is paid to actual plot and characterization. When you see a Tim Burton movie, you have to go in knowing that. You have to go in with no expectation of richly nuanced characters or subtle and wise plots.

This may give the appearance that I don't like Tim Burton as a director. Nothing could be further from the truth. Artistically, his movies always stun -- always. From the bizarro world of Pee-wee Herman to the bleak and cluttered Gotham City; from the inhuman cast of "Mars Attacks" to the inhuman cast of "Planet of the Apes" to the (most human of all) circus freaks in "Big Fish", Burton sees God in the details....and it is good.

"Corpse Bride" is like that -- filled with eye-feasts and visual puns (like the box of hands in the, um, "Second Hand Shop"). In Tim Burton's universe, the land of the living is entirely painted in shades of gray and black, limned in sepia. In his land of the dead, color abounds. Tim Burton is (and has always been) attracted to a side of life that is decidedly off-center, if not completely off the bubble (which makes me sidebarishly note that, while I greatly admire his sensibilities, he may not be the guy with whome I want to share my Thanksgiving table). The beauty of the worlds he creates, the highly-comic moments, the compelling nightmare quality of the film make this enjoyable, indeed -- even if all of those moments serve only the moment, and almost never the plot or characters.

In fact, the characters themselves are little more than ciphers -- holding-places in the plot. And as for that plot....this is a fable of sorts, and one can't hold the plot of a fable to the same candle that one holds Pinter. Still....the plot of "Corpse Bride" places itself squarely on a high-wire suspended over a pit of inanity -- and doesn't always stay upright. Victor, through sheer coincidence, ends up with the murdered and dead bride of the man who currently plots to steal and do the same to Victor's fiancee? The holes in the story could fill Albert Hall (which, by the way, we now know how many that requires).

Bafflingly, this movie occasionally breaks into song, although it's not a musical. Odd. Odder still is the fact that long-time Burton collaborator Danny Elfman has penned, arguably, the most forgettable and meandering songs I've heard in, well, ever.

Still, one should go into a Tim Burton film with Burtonesque expectations, and in that world I did, in fact, enjoy the movie very much. It's beautiful to look at, intriguing to behold, and full of dark humor. See it.

Then go home and read some Tony Hillerman.