Awesome Movie Review: Corpse Bride

Corpse Bride is an odd little movie. It’s a musical, which I didn’t expect. There was once a time when I would have been aware of such things. Back when I was “with it” or “down” with “the scene.” But those days are long gone. I thought about going to see a movie last week and when I looked at the listings, I had no clue what half the movies were. Did you know there’s some sort of animated movie with Andy Dick, Putty/The Tick and Xzibit? I didn’t. That’s how out of the current loop I am.

Since I didn’t realize Corpse Bride was a musical, I was pleasantly surprised to see a “Music/Songs by Danny Elfman” credit in the opening credit. I think Danny Elfman would be a pretty cool guy. There used to be this dude at the mall who claimed to have once owned and operated a boutique in New York that sold antique furniture and home furnishings to famous New Yorkers, including, but not necessarily limited to, Danny Elfman. That means there are only two degrees of separation between me and Danny Elfman. Top that.

Now, when I said earlier that Corpse Bride was “an odd little movie,” I wasn’t referring to the fact that it’s a musical. The entire movie seems like it should have been made 60 years ago. Not that the animation is bad or outdated—it’s not—but I just couldn’t shake the feeling that I was watching a modern version of an old Fleischer Bros. cartoon. Like the Fleischer’s work in the 30′s, Corpse Bride is filled with cheap, throwaway visual gags that are mostly there to just show off animation. Sure, they might be pointless jokes, but I’d rather see cheap jokes about people splitting in two and skeletons using each others bones as musical instruments than cheap jokes about rapping kangaroos or the accidental (or possibly even intentional) addition of semen to a beverage. Corpse Bride even has a singing and dancing skeleton, which brought to mind the rotoscoped Cab Calloway singing “St. James Infirmary Blues” in the Fleischer’s Snow-White.

(You might be wondering how Cab Calloway singing “St. James Infirmary Blues” fits in with the story of Snow White. It doesn’t. That’s what makes the Fleischer cartoons so brilliant.)

Corpse Bride might not have anything as bizarre as the time Betty Boop was falling into Wonderland, saw a jar of jam, said, “Ooh jam,” opened the jar and pulled out a man’s wildly cackling head, but the general feel of the old timey cartoons is still there, a welcome change from the singing, dancing and farting vermin that make up so much of contemporary animation. Well, I don’t really watch that many animated features these days, but I still feel it’s safe to assume that all the characters in them are flatulent vermin.

Even though I really enjoyed Corpse Bride there was not that much that stood out, other than the skeleton musical number and the Peter Lorre maggot. Well, that’s not entirely true. There’s the voice acting Christopher Lee. Christopher Lee is the coolest man alive. He’s cooler than Ichiro! Cooler than Morrissey. And when Albert Finney tries to come along and do some deep-voiced voice acting, Christopher Lee lays the goon hand on him with some of the finest deep-voiced voice acting since the days of Orson Welles. Someone needs to take that talking machine that Stephen Hawking and Radiohead use and make it use Christopher Lee’s voice. That would be sweet. I would irreparably damage my own vocal chords, just so I could use it. That’s how much I want to talk like Christopher Lee.

Even though I recognized the voices of Christopher Lee, Albert Finney and even Johnny Depp, I was a little confused by the female leads. I guess I didn’t read the opening credits carefully enough, because I thought the two females leads were Helena Bonham Carter and Emma Watson. This led me to believe that Johnny Depp’s character was faced with the horrible fate of accidentally marrying a tired old corpse like Helena Bonham Carter, when he could have been locking down an cute young piece of jailbait like Emma Watson. But it turns out the other female lead wasn’t Emma Watson, but Emily Watson, who is not jailbait. Not by a long shot. So Johnny Depp’s character is faced with the choice of staying married to a corpse of finding a way to marry Emily Watson. That’s like choosing between a week old sandwich and week old sandwich that’s been sexed up by Kenneth Branagh. If I were Johnny Depp, I’d have married Christopher Lee.

I highly recommend Corpse Bride. It might not be the greatest movie you’ll ever see, but it should keep you entertained for 80 minutes or so. Even if you don’t like animated musicals, you should still watch it as part of an effort to see every feature film Christopher Lee has appeared in. I recommend screening it as the middle of The Curse of Frankenstein, Corpse Bride, Howling II: Your Sister is a Werewolf triple feature. On my scale of one to five tiny heads of Sergei Eisenstein, I give Corpse Bride four tiny heads of Sergei Eisenstein.