charlie and the corpse bride

October 2, 2005

First up, the props: “Corpse Bride” is easily one of the most beautiful animated films I’ve ever seen (and I’ve seen a lot!). The new facial animation techniques create motion so smooth that at times you forget you’re watching a stop-motion film.

That is until you realize you’re watching a stop-motion story.

Ugh. There was nothing for me to grab onto - no MC throughline for which to empathize with on this amazing trip.

It’s funny too, because he could’ve just taken one of the MC throughlines from “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” and improved that film ten fold. In that film you’ve got Charlie with Willy as his IC and Willy with Christopher Lee as his IC (anything with Christopher Lee is automatically good).

So what does this mean? Both films audiences loved and could care less about the bits of story that were missing. Oh sure, I think they sense that there is something wrong - but the visuals and the imagination is so stunning that quickly discount their own intuition.

“Corpse Bride” is an anomaly for Burton as well. Usually he leaves out the Subjective Story (watch “Nightmare Before Christmas” - just as Jack and Sally are about to get together and actually share a scene, Tim quickly cuts to something else).

But it still was a beautiful film and I’ll still be the first in Best Buy on the Tuesday it comes out.

UPDATE: Chris has since posted his review for Corpse Bride. I think I was identifying more with his second storyform for the film - where there was no Main Character throughline at all. I do wish he had done the first storyform - I think it would’ve served the material better.