Movie Reviews
Tim Burton's Corpse Bride
Rated PG for some scary images and action, and brief mild language.
reviewed by Kevin D. Hendricks
A geeky groom accidentally weds a corpse while practicing his vows and enters the wacky world of the dead in this stop-motion animated fairy tale.
The Story
Victor Van Dort is a bookish and awkward outsider who has managed to ruin every marriage his parents arrange for him with one social faux pas or another. This time around his overzealous parents have set him up with Victoria Everglot, the innocent and naïve daughter of snobbish rich people no longer as rich as they appear.
Despite the arranged marriage, Victor and Victoria actually begin to fall for one another. But Victor can't seem to recite his vows and light the candle without setting his future mother-in-law on fire. That's a problem. The wedding is called off until Victor can get his act together and he wanders off into the eerie woods to practice his vows.
When he slips the wedding ring over a tree branch he inadvertently marries the Corpse Bride, a girl murdered while waiting for her groom. As his half-decomposed bride carts him off to the underworld, word spreads to the Everglots that Victor has been cavorting with another woman--an undead woman--and chaos ensues.
Will Victor escape the clutches of the Corpse Bride and return to his true love, Victoria? Will Victoria's parents force her to marry the detestable Barkis Bittern? Will anyone notice that Victor bears an uncanny yet rubbery resemblance to Johnny Depp (who provides the voice)?
The Verdict (What we thought of the movie on its own)
Tim Burton is weird. If you've ever seen Nightmare Before Christmas, you know that. We're talking about a movie with singing, dancing skeletons where a guy accidentally marries a corpse. Weird.
That's right. Singing and dancing. Did we mention Corpse Bride is a musical? Major plot points are delivered via song. It's not a full-on musical, but there's definitely choreography involved.
Are you following all this? Tim Burton. Musical. Stop-motion animation. Guy weds dead body. Weird. And, yet, fun. The whole movie is light-hearted and still dark, kind of like a Roald Dahl book. All those singing, dancing corpses deliver a lot of heart (even if theirs aren’t beating).
We see that warmth when Victor finds his dead dog, Scraps, in the underworld. The audience is prepared to be mortified, but Victor is thrilled to be reunited with his childhood pal, now a barking skeleton puppy. And I can't imagine how they resisted the urge to make jokes about the skeleton dog chewing its own bones. They couldn't resist eyeball jokes (everybody loves a good eyeball joke), but for the most part they avoided the typical gross-out humor you'd expect from, say, “Shrek.” They did an amazing job turning what seems like an incredibly morbid movie into something a lot more normal than you'd expect. It's still weird but a good weird.
“Corpse Bride” is rated PG for a few scary images (umm… dead people), but we're talking PG scary. In typical fairy tale fashion, the stuffy, pompous Everglots are more frightening than any of the walking corpses.
Worldview (How the movie’s take on life compares with a biblical perspective)
Let's dispense with the obvious: The afterlife is not some brightly-colored underworld where dead bodies sing and dance in varying states of decomposition. Except for some cryptic words in Ezekiel 37 about dry bones reanimating, the Bible is pretty clear that our physical bodies return to dust and don't keep walking around. (See 2 Corinthians 5:6-8.) Our souls are what will enter the afterlife, and we have two choices hinged to our response to Jesus: smoking or non (as the cheesy T-shirt says).
But this is a fairy tale. It's not Tim Burton's dancing corpse theory of the afterlife. What's important are the choices the characters have to make. Victor eventually feels compassion for the Corpse Bride and her tragic circumstances. He decides to make the ultimate sacrifice on her behalf.
That kind of sacrifice should be familiar to Christians. It's what Christ did for us, isn’t it? Dying, not to join us in death, but to give us new life. Interestingly, it’s also what the Bible calls living husbands to do for their living wives—to die to themselves, as Jesus did for the church, in an ongoing sacrifice of love. (Check out Ephesians 5:25-33.) We could use a few more Christian men with Victor’s willingness to trade life for love.
If you see the movie, questions you can discuss with friends, parents, or just think about on your own:
• Are you a Tim Burton fan? Which of his films do you like the best?
• What was your favorite corpse?
• Would seeing this movie have freaked you out as a eight-year-old? Why or why not?
• Is the story’s version of the afterlife worth talking about as compared to what Christians traditionally believer? Why or why not?
• What did you think of the sacrifice Victor was prepared to make for the Bride? Supreme act of love or really bad idea?
Copyright © 2005
