he film begins with a bright blue butterfly fluttering out of the hands of a young man and into a gloomy gray village that seems to spring to life with the idea of an impending wedding. The butterfly dances through the town as the odd sticklike figures break out in song and dance.
The butterfly essentially introduces the major players in the story, and the song explains the dilemma. The hands of the youth belong to Victor Van Dort (Depp), a tall, frail, pasty-faced wimpy youth who looks a bit like his real-life counterpart, and a lot like Edward Scissorhands without the scissors. His parents, Nell and William (Ullman and Finney), are fish merchants who are buying their way into high society by arranging a marriage of their son to the daughter of high-society aristocrats, Maudeline and Finis Everglot (Lumley and Finney), who have no more money. Their daughter Victoria (Watson) seems resigned to marrying a guy she's never met, and Victor seems simply terrified.
And so, on the eve of their wedding, when Victor wanders off to play a haunting melody on the piano, it's not surprising that Victoria wanders down the stairs and immediately falls in love with him.
During the wedding rehearsal, however, the Pastor (Lee) finds Victor's bumbling and fumbling inexcusable and cancels the nuptials until he can get them right. He heads off into the woods, practicing his vows, and places the ring on a twig sticking out of the ground, which turns out to be the bony finger of the Corpse Bride (Bonham Carter), who was mysteriously murdered on her wedding day.
When she insists that Victor is her new spouse, she takes him to the Land of the Dead, which is far livelier than the village. Skeletons, ghosts and other creatures inhabit a world that looks a bit like 1920s Paris (think Moulin Rouge). Although she's beautiful and perhaps one of the sexiest corpses ever put on screen, she does have her eye pop out every once in a while, and a wisecracking maggot inhabits her insides.
As in all mysterious stories, an unexpected visitor attends the wedding, this one named Barkis Bittern (Grant), who tries to steal away Victoria.
Nice day for a dead wedding
Unfortunately, Tim Burton will always be compared to himself, so inevitably the comparisons to Edward Scissorhands, Sleepy Hollow and Nightmare Before Christmas are going to come up. But this is far more original—although it's supposedly based on an Eastern European folk tale that no one seems to know about—and the musical numbers are wild and crazy.
Danny Elfman outdoes himself with the musical scores. It looks like it's going to be a musical all the way through, but after the first few numbers, telling the story through song seems to be abandoned—and that's good. Elfman does a creepy number called "Bonejangles" that seems to be an homage to the more obscure classic early cartoons by Disney and Looney Tunes that have skeletons dancing around and playing instruments made out of bones.
This visual treat allows Burton to give us exactly what he has imagined in this weird world. Because it's made up of puppets and some computer-generated images, it is as fanciful, fantastic and dark as anything he could come up with in his imagination—and he's not limited as he may have been with Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.
The voices are from some of the world's finest actors—nearly all of them Oscar nominees from the past. The question is, why are they necessary? No one is as distinguishable as a Robin Williams, and it's curious if the famous voice names will actually attract fans.
This isn't a "nice" little story, like the Wallace & Gromit fans may expect from that upcoming film. It's filled with grotesque images, hints of necrophilia and the realization that we're all going to die. With lines in the song like "Die, die, we all pass away/But don't wear a frown 'cause it's really OK/You might try and hide and you may try and pray/But we all end up the remains of the day." If your kids are well rounded, they won't mind the underlying message and will love the celebration.
