Tim Burton’s stop-motion animated romantic musical comedy, Corpse Bride, opens today in a handful of theaters in New York and Los Angeles. Co-directed by Mike Johnson, the film has been receiving high marks from critics and should generate health box office when it opens nationwide on Friday, Sept. 23.
Based on a 19th century Eastern European folk tale, Corpse Bride stars Oscar nominee Johnny Depp (Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl, Sleepy Hollow) as the voice of Victor, a young man who is about to be wed when he is whisked away to the underworld and married to the mysterious Corpse Bride, voiced by Helena Bonham-Carter (Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Wallace & Gromit: Curse of the Were-Rabbit). Frightened of her at first, Victor warms up to his departed spouse and finds himself torn between two worlds. Emily Watson (Equilibrium, Punch Drunk Love) provides the voice of Victoria, Victor’s fiancée who pines away for him in the land of the living.
Corpse Bride was animated in England under animation supervisor Anthony Scott, who worked with Burton on his 1993 stop-mo opus, The Nightmare Before Christmas. The puppet armatures were machined by Merrick Cheney, and fabricators Mackinnon & Saunders in Manchester, England, crafted mechanical heads that allowed the animators to bring more expression and fluid lip sync to the characters. And while the majority of the feature was done with stop-motion, The Moving Picture Co. added some CG elements here and there.
Read more about the making of Corpse Bride in the September issue of Animation Magazine, and check out our reactions to the movie at www.animationmagazine.net/article.php?article_id=4474.
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