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Entertainment Weekly, 9/23/05

Death Becomes Her
by Steve Daly
Donated By Deppraved

Tim Burton's Corpse Bride, a romance from beyond the grave, reunites the director with frequent collaborator Johnny Depp and returns him to his first love - animation.

Tim Burton started his career as a Disney animation artist in Burbank back in the late 1970's. This was a decade before The Little Mermaid revived the studio's moribund hand-drawn cartoon output, and it wasn't a fun time for Burton. He churned out drawing after drawing for the treacly cartoon feature The Fox and the Hound, then worked on the megaflop The Black Cauldron. It took 12 to 24 drawings just to create one second of action on screen, and Burton couldn't stand the water-torture tediousness. "I had to leave animation," he says, speaking from London, where he now lives. "I couldn't handle it. My brain couldn't take it. Because you have to be an artist and also a technician. And you have to have an extreme amount of patience." He forged a high-profile career directing live action instead, generating often spectacular box office results and plenty of critical plaudits along the way. But he still loved animation, especially stop-motion animation, which entranced him as a child in Ray Harryhausen's creature flicks and all those corny Rankin-Bass TV specials like Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. So, he played patron of the art. Acting as a producer, he got Disney to finance (and Henry Selick to direct) 1993's stop-motion-puppet musical The Nighmare Before Christmas. A modest grosser in theaters, it kept on making ancilliary money with videos, TV airings, and Goth-chic collectibles.

Now comes another PG-rated puppet opus, Tim Burton's Corpse Bride, codirected by Burton and Mike Johnson (a Nightmare technician making his feature-directing debut). The $40 million boy-meets-ghoul story was financed by Warner Bros., the studio that hired Burton for Pee-Wee's Big Adventure, Beetlejuice, the first two Batman movies, and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. With Corpse Bride, the studio is gambling on a tale whose title and tortured-courtship theme aren't exactly guaranteed audience getters. Burton says the studio asked at one point, Could you maybe consider a different title? But he also says they didn't offer alternatives. "Maybe The Not-So-Alive Girl," he jokes.

Set in a vaguely Eastern European town in the 19th century, Corpse Bride involves a surprisingly angsty, adult roundelay of emotional conflicts between shy Victor (voiced by Johnny Depp), his equally shy fiancee, Victoria (Emily Watson), and the undead, dressed-in-white woman whom Victor accidentally weds when he rehearses his vows over the corpse's grave (a beautiful apparition voiced by Burton's wife, Helena Bonham Carter). The poor woman, it turns out, was murdered on her wedding night before she could say "I do," so she's thrilled to finally have a husband. She drags Victor to an underground land of the dead, and Victor has to choose between keeping an undead wife or going back to a live fiancee. The movie's playfully gruesome images percolated in Burton's head for nearly a decade before he got to put them on film. Around the time he did Nightmare, he was looking for another quirky story to realize in stop-motion. According to Burton, that's when Joe Ranft, a gifted story artist who worked on many Disney pictures before moving to Pixar, brought him the basic idea for Corpse Bride. (Ranft has an exec-producer credit on the movie. Sadly, he didn't live to see the final prints; he was killed August 16 in a car accident.)

Burton sparked to the premise, and that kicked off a long development slog. Caroline Thompson (Edward Scissorhands) and Pamela Pettler (the upcoming Monster House) did script work; final stitch-ups were done by John August, who adapted Burton's version of Chocolate Factory. By Fall of 2002, Burton had tapped Mike Johnson (who'd shown Burtonian spirit with a stop-motion short called The Devil Went Down to Georgia) to set up filming in East London.

The 12- to 18-inch figures that Johnson and roughly 20 animators spent 11 months choreographing, one frame at a time, represent something new in poseable-puppet technology. Instead of having premolded faces that pop on and off for a limited number of expressions, they've got watchwork engineering inside their heads that can be accessed through teeny holes in the ears and the hair.

Insert a key in these hidden spots, turn it, and the puppets' facial expressions change in tiny, subtle ways. The trade-off? The work is incredibly tedious. "It takes its toll," says codirector Johnson. "There are a lot of physical demands, standing all day and reaching over sets to twist these puppets around." One animator even found himself having dreams that he was posing himself in a movie of his own life.

Burton didn't exactly have a restful time of it either, since he wound up codirecting Corpse at the same time he was shooting Chocolate Factory. (The schedule overlap proved useful in corralling some of the same actors to work on both films, including Depp, Bonham Carter, and Christopher Lee.) "You couldn't do it with two live-action films, that's for sure," Burton says. "I don't know if I'd do it again, but I liked it. Mike (Johnson) was there on the day-to-day deal - you know, slugging it out in the trenches. I was able to take more of an overview, which was very beneficial. I think it's kind of why I got out of animation, in a certain way. It's a very tunnel-visioned process. You can get so into it, you start to lose your objectivity."

One thing that Burton, the animators, and the writers were especially concerned about was making sure not to push the creepy factor too far. Says August, "It's unusual to have an animated movie that deals with murder and death and dark themes. But we were always mindful of making sure kids will be able to watch it. We test-screened it with kids, and they loved it the way they love Halloween. It has a sense of safe darkness to it."

For Burton, it's kids, not parents, who should decide if they're ready for his jokey-spooky visions. "Adults forget that kids are like anybody," he says. "They're the best judge to know whether they can take something or not. People thought Nightmare was too scary for kids, and kids loved it." So here's the litmus test. Real maggots? Gross. Snarky little singing maggot who sounds like Peter Lorre and pops cheerfully out of the Corpse Bride's empty eye socket? That's junior's call. ***

(Correction from Deppraved: Above article says that Helena Bonham Carter is Tim's wife. She and Tim are not married, but live together in London with their 2 year old son, Billy.)

Included in the article is a section called "EW's Favorite Burton Movies" and it lists four, two of which are Johnny's.

Lisa Schwarzbaum wrote about Edward Scissorhands: Of all the enchanted collaborations between Burton and the beautiful boy muse Johnny Depp, none is as perfect as the mind meld that brought to life an artificial man with snippers for fingers. And of all the mellifluous partnerships between Burton and his favorite composer, Danny Elfman, none matches the rightness of this score. For me, Edward Scissorhands has always been the complete Tim Burton movie: odd and lovely, sad and satiric, elusive and a little lonely, the whole thing sustained with blithe originality.

Here is Owen Gleiberman's write-up about Ed Wood:

Ed Wood in his deepest and most perversely divine film to date, Burton discovers the sublime in the ridiculous, turning his gothic gaze upon the worst filmmaker of all time. In the sleazy shadows of '50's Hollywood, Edward D. Wood, Jr. (Johnny Depp) gathers a stock company of loser-freaks, outs himself as a cross-dresser, and makes horror films so bad that the sets shake. His dialogue for the aging morphine junkie Bela Lugosi (Martin Landau) turns sci-fi gibberish into brain-dead confession, yet Wood, played by Depp as a figure of cockeyed moonstruck fervor, remains as pure of passion as he is bereft of talent.