The Oscar-nominated animated feature Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride is having its television premiere just as the Halloween festivities begin to ramp up. The comically macabre stop-motion musical airs tonight, Oct. 19, at 8 p.m. on cable outlet ABC Family. Tonight’s broadcast should be the first of many October airings as the film takes its rightful place as a Halloween staple alongside long-time favorites It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown, Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas and Rankin & Bass’s Mad Monster Party.
Corpse Bride stars Johnny Depp as the voice of Victor, a young man who is whisked away to the underworld and wed to the mysterious title character, voiced by Helena Bonham Carter. While the Land of the Dead proves more lively than his Victorian England, Victor must find a way to get back above ground to his fianc’e, Victoria (Emily Watson). Burton’s co-director on the film was Mike Johnson, who recently signed on to replace Triplets of Belleville helmer Sylvain Chomet as director of Universal Pictures’ upcoming animated feature The Tale of Despereaux.
Released in September of 2005, Corpse Bride earned just $53 million in North America and took in nearly $117 million worldwide before arriving on home video in January. The film lost the Best Animated Feature Oscar to Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit from DreamWorks Animation/Aardman Animations, but together the two productions helped generate a renewed interest in stop-motion. There are several stop-mo holiday specials in the works and on the big-screen we can look forward to LAIKA’s adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s Coraline, which director Henry Selick tells us will be shot in stereoscopic 3D. In addition, Disney has shelled out some big bucks to have Industrial Light & Magic create a 3D version of Burton’s 1994 stop-motion opus The Nightmare Before Christmas, which will be in theaters this Friday, Oct. 20.
Leave a Reply