Corpse Bride (Les Noces funèbres ou La Mariée cadavérique au Québec) - Tim Burton (2005)

Extract

[...] The faces are pale and stiff, not a smile can be perceived on their lips. The characters and the village seem to be plunged in a heavy and oppressive darkness. The only emotion people seem to be able to feel are greed and sadness. Therefore, what is interesting, and what makes this movie and its story differ from more classic Gothic tales is that in this case, the horror doesn't necessarily come from the unknown and the paranormal. On the contrary, the world of the dead is a colourful place, filled with music (jazz music precisely, which can appear as an anachronism but might make us think that the dead are maybe ahead of their time) and laughter. [...]

[...] Corpse Bride (Les Noces funèbres ou La Mariée cadavérique au Québec) – Tim Burton (2005) Corpse Bride is a 2005 animated film directed by Tim Burton. It was created using the technique of stop-motion, which consists of objects being physically manipulated between individually photographed frames. In this case, the objects used are puppets with movable joints, as in many other Tim Burton movies like the well-known Nightmare Before Christmas, which is very much similar to Corpse Bride in many aspects. [...]

[...] And more precisely a feminine type of tragedy. Indeed, this movie, like many others, seems to romanticise the sacrifice, and even more when it comes from a woman. When watching the movie, we can't help but notice the different intertextuality at work. First, we notice the clear allusion to Alice in Wonderland: Victor runs to the wood from a formal event where he can't seem to find his place and falls into a hole in the ground which takes him to another “magical” world. [...]

[...] To conclude, we can say that Corpse Bride is definitely an interesting and unusual movie for children, with strong visuals which very much represent Burton's style and work in general. It challenges many of the stereotypes of what a good movie for children should be: light, cute, a bit superficial and instead deals with subjects that are rarely ever addressed in such movies. It also plays with genres and revisits well-established genres such as the Gothic, making it something fresh and fun. [...]

[...] One of the scraggy figures tells the priest to “keep it down, we're in a church”. This sentence, which can seem rather ironical and humorous since we could wonder what use a revenant could make of a church, and religion as a whole (since there is no other mention of it in the movie; the world of the undead neither represents heaven nor hell), reveals itself to be a very significant statement. It indeed shows that the dead, although scary at first, have more values than the livings. [...]