The Corpse Bride

2005 animated love story

Rating: 14/20 (Becky: 18/20; Jen: 11/20 [slept through most of the movie]; Dylan: 11/20; Emma: 13/20; Abbey: 17/20)

Plot: Betrothed Victor and Victoria run into problems when the clumsy groom-to-be botches his lines during a wedding rehearsal. He retreats to the forest to work on his vows and accidentally marries the titular dead woman. Oh, snap! It's a weird love triangle.

This isn't a bad movie, but it's not exactly one that I connect with. I like the animation. A butterfly at the beginning is just showing off. A bird bunch, animated hair, a veil, billowing dust and smoke, tears, raindrops on windows. There are some really neat animated details, stuff that I'm not sure I've seen in stop animation before. I also really liked the way the camera moves through the miniature world, and the characters, though almost a little too strange and stylized, have these great facial expressions that give them a richness and personality. My favorite scenes are the ones in the land of the dead, a place which seems a lot livelier than the land of the living. Although I suppose that's the point. There's some fun visual humor and silly bits of darkness in those scenes though. Dependable Danny Elfman's incidental music is great, but the songs with lyrics mostly just pass the time. Yep, it's another musical for Family Movie Night. The plot's pretty thin here, and the movie would have been way too short without the songs. Ultimately, I want to like this one more than I actually do. There's just something missing, and I have trouble putting my finger on what it is.