Saturday, September 24, 2005

Corpse Bride Review

Welcome to the first of my fall movie reviews. Historically my forte has been the summer blockbusters, whereas fall is the home of Oscar-bait and indies which i enjoy quite a bit, but they certainly don't carry the same "hype factor" that gets me chomping at the bit to see them. More recently however studios have increasingly scheduled their tent-pole releases for this season (a trend that started a few years ago with Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter), and I couldn’t be happier. While I love summer movie season, clustering all the big releases together has always somewhat taken away that electricity from the rest of the year. With films like Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, The Chronicles of Narnia, and King Kong on the horizon though (not to mention those Oscar-bait movies like Spielberg’s Munich and Mendes’ Jarhead), it appears that fall 2005 could very well top an especially strong summer.

Opening the fall movie season is Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride which sets the bar incredibly high right out of the gate. For the sake of full disclosure I should tell you that Burton’s last foray into stop motion animation, The Nightmare Before Christmas is one of my all time favorite movies. Ever since I was a kid, Halloween has been my favorite holiday and Nightmare has been like my It’s a Wonderful Life. So knowing this one can see that while Corpse Bride had big shoes to fill, it should also be noted that if you aren’t a fan of Nightmare, you shouldn’t expect to have the same reaction I did to Corpse Bride. Now that that’s out of the way, I can properly start my gushing. This is the best movie I have seen this year. There are so many things to love about this film that I barely know where to start. The visuals are absolutely stunning. Burton has resuscitated for the second time a form of animation long thought to be deceased. It’s ironic that in a time where 2-D animation is falling by the wayside in favor of 3-D animation that a film shot in an even more “primitive” form of animation comes along and blows the so-called “wave of the future” animated movies out the water. I can say with confidence that Corpse Bride looks better than any non-Disney animated movie I’ve ever seen. As awesome as the visuals are however, the real star of the show (as with Nightmare) is the music. While the songs themselves aren’t quite on the level of Nightmare’s best (with the exception of the phenomenal ballad sung by the titular character and two of the smaller characters in the film), the score is absolutely transcendent. When it comes to film composers, there are only two names that matter: John Williams and Danny Elfman. Although it had been a while since Elfman really came through with a score as outstanding as his most memorable efforts, he completely nails it here. So here I’ve painted a picture of a movie that is visually breathtaking and beautiful musically, but I’m not even done yet. Corpse Bride is also very funny. It may not be fall-out-of-your-chair hilarious (that would be The 40 Year Old Virgin), but I certainly found myself laughing out loud as much as I did during Wedding Crashers. I could go on and on, but if you’ve gotten this far, you’ve seen that I love the film and I’ve told you why I love it, so much like the movie itself my review may not be overly long, but it’s as long as it needed to be. I’ll see you again in November with my review of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire.