There is only one Tim Burton. No other director on this planet can be counted on for continually putting breath-takingly unique images on the screen. Though Burton is not my favorite director, (that distinction falls to Spelberg) Burton is certainly my favorite visualist. I love looking at Tim Burton movies and The Corpse Bride is no exception. The fabrics, the hairdos, the silhouettes, the sets, the lighting, all stunning. Possibly the best lighting I've seen all year.
But alas, the Corpse Bride is a movie not a painting and herein lies the problem. The story is completely uninvolving, most of the characters are unlikable and the pace is slow, slow, slow. I sat there awestruck by the beauty and bored by the story. Bored. I wanted to turn the sound off and just play music and watch it like a silent film.
It feels like a 30 minute movie stretched out to 80 minutes. And much of the film is a direct lift from A Nightmare Before X-mas, a movie I saw 12 times at the theater when it first came out. If you watch them back to back, which you can do now in LA you will see the similarities. It's not just the theme of two-worlds-colliding that makes the films so similar but the characters, the song ideas, even the shapes of the faces and bodies,
The Corpse Bride owes everything to Nightmare Before X-Mas except Nightmare had characters I could root for in a story I cared about full of images I had never seen before. The Corpse Bride is no Nigtmare.
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