The Corpse Bride poster
Corpse Bride Review
Even though The Corpse Bride is only doing
a limited release to theaters tomorrow, I'd expect it to fair pretty well
this weekend. The only competition I can see it having is Lord
of War, which is in an entirely different bracket. So,
on to the early Corpse Bride reviews!
Latino
Review
The failure that lies with the film is that style succeeds over substance. Burton’s projects have always had a style of their own, but at the center of them all were intriguing stories and characters that were easy to relate with no matter what kooky eccentricities they possessed. This film is a lavishly designed production with a few clever musical numbers by Burton’s longtime collaborator Danny Elfman, but the story is rather, well... dead.
Rolling
Stone
The Oscar for this year's Best Animated Feature Film belongs right here, even though the ravishing goth romance that Tim Burton has conjured up in Corpse Bride isn't strictly animated in the computer-generated sense. Burton and his co-director, Mike Johnson, use the stop-motion technique, which means taking puppets -- about a foot tall -- and painstakingly moving them half a millimeter at a time to achieve a subtlety of expression beyond the range of CGI. It takes a twelve-hour work day to produce even a second or two of usable footage. Burton used stop-motion in 1993's The Nightmare Before Christmas, but the digital improvements at his disposal now really make it sing.
Entertainment
Weekly
As an achievement in macabre visual wizardry, Tim Burton's Corpse Bride
has to be reckoned some sort of marvel. It's Burton's second foray into
the nostalgic world of stop-motion animation (he codirected it with Mike
Johnson), yet far more than the first, 1993's The Nightmare Before Christmas,
Corpse Bride is a ghoulishly witty crackpot puppet show, a sculpted musical
dreamscape of kiddie-gothic expressionist design.
We recognize this place as a classically debauched Burton funhouse, but almost everything that happens in Corpse Bride is there to prop up its jumpin' Halloween parade of visual whimsy, rather than the other way around. Somehow, working with these elegant carved-in-silicone puppets turns Burton's sense of drama to wood. As a piece of comic shock theater that flirts with being too goth for tots, Corpse Bride has much to recommend it, but I'm still waiting for the day when Burton, in an animated film, gets us to care about what's making our own eyes pop out.
Check out all the early reviews for The Corpse
Bride by clicking on any of the links above. Though almost all the
early reviews are positive, most do admit that it is hard to get behind
the characters. We'll see if it is the eye-candy or the story that will
take The Corpse Bride through the box office by the end of the
weekend.
For the trailers, movie stills, clips and synopsis, go to The
Corpse Bride Movie Page.
Stay tuned for updates.
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