Corpse Bride

Corpse Bride was great, just like I thought it would be. In fact, it was exactly as I expected it to be -- which is good and bad.

I like Tim Burton and I like Johnny Depp, but I'm getting a little tired of Tim Burton and Johnny Depp, together forever, true love always, etc. This time we have a Johnny Depp puppet. He is great, don't get me wrong, and I deeply understand the fixation, but... enough already. Note to Johnny Depp: More Finding Neverlands. More Pirates. Fewer deranged chocolate magnates. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory was a magnificent disaster.

Corpse Bride is neither a disaster nor a mess. In fact, it is lovely and charming, in exactly the way you would expect it to be -- no more and no less. The soundtrack is spot on, the visuals are haunting and exquisite, and the storyline is sweet. It did not blow me into next week like Nightmare Before Christmas did. However, this time I felt like I was in familiar territory, and when I saw "Nightmare" for the first time, I'd never seen anything like that before. Maybe if I'd seen this one first, I would have felt the same about it.

As for the love triangle between Emily Watson, Helena Boneham Carter, and Johnny Depp, I was definitely rooting for the Corpse Bride to win. The ending was tidy. The whole movie, in fact, was a little tidy. After the "Ahhhh cool!" moment of seeing how the real world was faded and the afterworld was saturated with color, I didn't see anything else in the movie to really charm me, apart from the usual Burton visuals.

I think that with the Legend of Sleep Hollow, Burton just lifted the bar so high that even he has trouble climbing over it any more. The one thing that did completely enthrall me was the fact that this is stop-motion animation. At the beginning of the film, I said to my husband, "It almost looks like stop-motion animation, but it couldn't possibly be. They must have used computers to kind of simulate it, for nostalgia purposes." No, it is really the genuine article. Which is stunning and beautiful. If you watch the "making of" featurette on the DVD, your teeth will fall out of your head with admiration for the effort that goes into this stuff. It is truly amazing.