Corpse Bride!
Sep. 26th, 2005 01:12 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
verbminxWe saw Corpse Bride earlier tonight... it was good, but not especially distinctive, especially in the inevitable comparison to Nightmare Before Christmas. May not be fair, because the older movie is a lot more of a fable. The newer one is probably plotted more tightly, albeit predictably. It isn't as cute and cartoony as the previous movie - a lot of Burton's characteristic visual flourishes are missing, but he's been moving away from them for years. (What I mean is: no longer does every point turn into a spiral curl.)
But the choice to make the "real world" of the living bland, in shades of grey, basically meant that most scenes set in that area were only as visually interesting as the characters in them. Those characters are mostly intentionally-charmless grotesques, so half the movie is not particularly charming. The world of the dead is, as all reviewers have commented, the side that most viewers will find compelling, and is also significantly more humorous. Setting about half of the movie in a place that offers almost no sense of delight hurts it in comparison to Nightmare, which has something new and darling about every ten seconds.
None of the music is particularly special - it's pleasant, and I especially liked the piano melody that Victor plays several times throughout the story, but no tunes stand out as hummable or singable. Friend K. actively hated the music; I just thought it was pastiche Gilbert & Sullivan or Dixieland Jazz.
You're thrown quickly into the events of the story before you get to know much about the characters. All of them know each other about as well as the viewer knows them, which isn't well at all.
Neither Tom nor I really liked the design of Emily, the title character; it was the fault of the uncorpsey elements rather than the corpsey ones. She too closely resembles Sally with a hint of Helena Bonham Carter's features, and a deviation from that look would have been nice. There are also particular things we didn't like about how they did the design... lips a weird shade of pink and too thick in the corners of the mouth, lashes look heavily clumped with mascara. Victoria looks great but is completely different, delicately pretty; we would have liked to have seen an Emily somewhere between Victoria (so they look like the same species) and the design they used (to maintain her extreme luscious beauty and moderate decay). Incidentally, it's VERY difficult to call Victoria by the correct name - she looks like an Emily, and is voiced by Emily Watson into the bargain, but "Emily" is the Corpse Bride rather than the living one.
Now I've said the bad things - these are pretty much the ONLY things I didn't like about the movie; I will totally want a copy when it comes out on DVD and I'll probably try to see it in the theater as many times as I can. Two things I especially liked: the first scene with Scraps, and the first scene with the Elder.
But the choice to make the "real world" of the living bland, in shades of grey, basically meant that most scenes set in that area were only as visually interesting as the characters in them. Those characters are mostly intentionally-charmless grotesques, so half the movie is not particularly charming. The world of the dead is, as all reviewers have commented, the side that most viewers will find compelling, and is also significantly more humorous. Setting about half of the movie in a place that offers almost no sense of delight hurts it in comparison to Nightmare, which has something new and darling about every ten seconds.
None of the music is particularly special - it's pleasant, and I especially liked the piano melody that Victor plays several times throughout the story, but no tunes stand out as hummable or singable. Friend K. actively hated the music; I just thought it was pastiche Gilbert & Sullivan or Dixieland Jazz.
You're thrown quickly into the events of the story before you get to know much about the characters. All of them know each other about as well as the viewer knows them, which isn't well at all.
Neither Tom nor I really liked the design of Emily, the title character; it was the fault of the uncorpsey elements rather than the corpsey ones. She too closely resembles Sally with a hint of Helena Bonham Carter's features, and a deviation from that look would have been nice. There are also particular things we didn't like about how they did the design... lips a weird shade of pink and too thick in the corners of the mouth, lashes look heavily clumped with mascara. Victoria looks great but is completely different, delicately pretty; we would have liked to have seen an Emily somewhere between Victoria (so they look like the same species) and the design they used (to maintain her extreme luscious beauty and moderate decay). Incidentally, it's VERY difficult to call Victoria by the correct name - she looks like an Emily, and is voiced by Emily Watson into the bargain, but "Emily" is the Corpse Bride rather than the living one.
Now I've said the bad things - these are pretty much the ONLY things I didn't like about the movie; I will totally want a copy when it comes out on DVD and I'll probably try to see it in the theater as many times as I can. Two things I especially liked: the first scene with Scraps, and the first scene with the Elder.
