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Burton took a backseat for one of his best films
Forget Wildwood, Laika's first stop-motion movie is streaming now on HBO Max
When it comes to beautiful, high-quality stop-motion animation, independent studio Laika is the first name that comes to mind. The studio’s hand-crafted puppetry and 3D-printing technology have brought beautiful tales to life for years, from Coraline to ParaNorman. Each has leaned toward more adult themes with gothic narrative undertones, while still focusing heavily on family dynamics. The same is true of Laika’s most recent outing, Travis Knight’s ethereal fantasy film Wildwood.
Yet as much a technical and emotional achievement as Wildwood has proven to be, you don’t need to head to your local theater to see Laika's best animated film. All you need to do is go to HBO Max, where Tim Burton’s masterful 2005 Corpse Bride is streaming right now.
A gothic fairy tale
Directed by Tim Burton and Mike Johnson, Corpse Bride follows Victor Van Dort (Johnny Depp) and his arranged marriage to Victoria Everglot (Emily Watson). After a terrible rehearsal dinner, Victor heads to the woods to practice his vows. Without thinking, he says them aloud and slips his ring onto what he believes is a tree branch sticking out from the ground. But the “branch” is actually the finger of an undead bride, Emily (Helena Bonham Carter), who immediately assumes they’re engaged. Victor is soon dragged into the land of the dead, where he comes face-to-face with its inhabitants.
If the story sounds familiar, there’s a reason. Burton was open about the fact that Corpse Bride was based on “The Finger”, a Jewish tale by author Howard Schwartz, and featured in “Lilith’s Cave: Jewish Tales of the Supernatural.” In this tale, set in Russia rather than Victorian England, the young bridegroom also makes the same mistake as Victor, slipping his wedding ring onto a corpse's finger as he recites his vows. However, instead of helping the undead bride find peace, the groom takes his dead spouse to a local rabbi, who annuls the marriage because his wife is dead. The bride falls to pieces into a pile of bones, and the groom goes on to live his life as if nothing ever happened. C’est la vie.
That transition from a Jewish folktale to a mainstream gothic fairy tale brought many changes. As macabre and unsettling as Burton’s productions can be, he is undoubtedly a creator whose endings usually have a sweet quality — bitter or otherwise. That meant Emily, the undead bride, found a more peaceful, fulfilling end, while Victor became more empathetic. It made sense: no matter how terrifying some of Burton’s films might seem, they usually target a family-friendly, universal audience.
“We wanted to make a version that wasn’t so disturbing that you couldn’t put it in a family movie,” Corpse Bride’s co-screenwriter John August explained in an interview with Jewish Journal. As for the setting and the change to non-Jewish characters, August said Burton gravitates toward “universal, fairy-tale qualities in his films.”
A new direction for Burton
Much about Corpse Bride was a first for many of the film's cast and crew. Burton, for example, had produced many stop-motion animated films before, such as The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993) and James and the Giant Peach (1996). Corpse Bride was Burton's first stop-motion directing credit, though he mostly took a backseat as co-director due to simultaneously working on Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. This left Johnson to take what he describes as a more “organic” approach to directing.
“Tim knew where he wanted the film to go as far as the emotional tone and story points to hit,” Johnson explained in an interview with Creative Planet Network. “My job was to work with the crew on a daily basis and get the footage as close as possible to how I thought he wanted it.”
Burton still had exclusive control over storyboards, concepts, and scenes, and each one had to be reviewed and approved before Johnson could say it was finished. But for the meat of production, Johnson was in charge.
Johnson being in charge, however, didn’t mean that Corpse Bride lost Burton’s distinct style. Burton has never shied away from his macabre, stark aesthetic. Even his less well-received works, such as his Alice in Wonderland adaptations, feature a clear visual divide that makes the contrast appealing while still conveying his distinctly Burton-esque style. The Red Queen’s castle, for example, looks and feels very different from the Mad Hatter’s tea party.
Burton’s use of contrast makes Corpse Bride an enigma at first. Everything seems the same: the world of the living is steeped in dreary gray and black, making every character appear miserable and depleted by the world they inhabit. Ironically, true life begins only when we reach the land of the dead: an explosion of yellow, green, blue, and red. The dead have more life and music, truly living as they wish, with the freedom death has granted them.
As for Laika, the stop-motion studio co-produced Corpse Bride as its first official project after current CEO and Wildwood director Travis Knight took over what had been Will Vinton Studios. Four years later, it released its debut feature, the very Burton-esque Coraline, directed by Henry Selick, before charting its own course as a leading stop-motion studio. Years later, every Laika project still carries a hint of Burton's childlike wonder and gothic beauty.
Flipping audiences’ expectations of what they'll see has always been a signature trait of both Burton and Laika. As one of the highest-grossing animated films of all time, Corpse Bride’s success makes it easy to see why it remains so beloved more than 20 years later.
Corpse Bride is available to stream on HBO Max now.