Corpse Bride

I fell in love with Corpse Bride this evening. The movie is a living Halloween card delivered a month early. Oh, as usual with Tim Burton's films, I wish he wasn't afraid of giving the movie goers a scare or two. But that's a minor quibble to a film this wonderful. That's not to say it's a movie I would take my young children to see. Any movie with a maggot popping out of a mouldering corpse's eye socket is probably too dark for them to see even if the stop-action animation is a delight. Danny Elfman's score also is fantastical. When Victor Van Dort (voiced perfectly by Johnny Depp) practices his wedding vows in a dark woods, he puts the wedding band on what he believes is a twig. Unbeknownst to him, it is the skeletal finger of the Corpse Bride, murdered and buried in a shallow grave behind the church (where Christopher Lee scarily provides the voice to Pastor Galswells). The Corpse Bride (voiced by Helena Bonham Carter) is delighted by the marriage. She takes Victor into the Land of the Dead with her. While the Land of the Living is gray and slow moving, the Land of the Dead is filled with laughter and companionship. Considering the allure of the Corpse Bride (what matters a bit of decomposed flesh when she moves like that?) and the Land of the Dead, you do have to wonder why Victor is so eager to return to the Land of the Living and his arranged upcoming nuptials to Victoria (voiced by Emily Watson). When it seems as if the movie is veering too close to soap operatic love triangle, the movie returns to the delightful macabre humor, such as when the maggot (voiced by Enn Reitel channelling Peter Lorre) tells the Corpse Bride, "I would think you'd lost your mind if I hadn't just been crawling through it."