Corpse Bride (2005) – Review by Andrea Carnevali

Corpse Bride  ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Corpse Bride may just be Tim Burton’s very best film: every gothic, tender, macabre element comes together here in a way that feels genuinely complete, and a film about death has never felt so strangely alive.

I’m going out on a limb here, but I think Corpse Bride is possibly Tim Burton’s very best film. It has all the things that make his work so distinctive, but here they all seem to come together in a way that feels complete: the dark edge, the tenderness, the macabre humour, the melancholy, the romance, and that deliciously gothic sensibility we loved in some of his other films, from Edward Scissorhands and Beetlejuice all the way to his latest TV series, Wednesday.

The first thing one notices, of course, is the design. The contrast between the two worlds is truly inspired. The world of the living is drained of colour, grey, dull, rigid, restrained, almost airless, while the world of the dead is bursting with energy, warmth, and unexpected joy. It’s such a brilliant visual idea that it almost does half the storytelling for you before a single line is even spoken: the world of the ‘dead’ is the one full of life. Death is more vivid than life.

The stop-motion feels especially rich and expressive. Every frame seems packed with detail, every movement slightly ‘crooked’ in the best possible way, giving the whole film a handmade beauty that digital animation could never quite replicate. There’s a tactile quality to everything, from the character designs to the sets, that makes the film feel like a little gothic dollhouse brought to life.

The songs are wonderfully catchy too, and they help give the film a strange playfulness, adding to the mood, the irony, and that Burton-esque mix of sweetness and sorrow, funny one moment and unexpectedly moving the next.

It’s one of those very rare animated gems (another one being Coraline), that, despite being ‘for kids’, never feels dumbed down: it is weird, romantic, a little gruesome, and emotionally thoughtful in a way that children can enjoy but adults can appreciate on another level. There is something refreshingly honest about that. It doesn’t try to flatten its strangeness or apologise for its darkness.

Burton here seems unusually disciplined, never allowing his gothic, whimsical flair or his eccentricity to overwhelm the emotional core or really tip into the self-conscious silliness of some of his other mannered work (Beetlejuice is a perfect example of that ‘going too far’ for me). That restraint makes all the difference. The film is still unmistakably Burton, but maybe because he is co-directing with Mike Johnson (who worked as an animator on films like The Nightmare Before Christmas), it all feels more controlled, more precise, and more emotionally coherent.

And I haven’t even talked about the voice cast, with so many names packed in that during the opening credits we all gasped aloud at the sheer quantity of them, including Emily Watson, Christopher Lee, Albert Finney, and Richard E. Grant. Johnny Depp gives Victor the perfect mixture of awkwardness, sincerity, and vulnerability, and reminds us all what a good actor he used to be. While Helena Bonham Carter, who I’m usually not a massive fan of, makes Emily, the corpse bride, heartbreakingly funny, romantic, and tragic all at once.

A film about death has never felt so strangely alive!

Oh, and by the way, it’s only 1 hour and 17 minutes. Hooray!!

Andrea Carnevali is a Bafta winning film maker who lives in Chiswick, and a co-creator of the Chiswick In Film festival.