im Burton still dresses in black and obviously retains his taste for the macabre. And though he's a little too cheerful to be a proper "goth" he notes that he's still somewhat of a hero in that scene. "A few weeks ago I was out in the English countryside and I ran into a (goth) girl with a Nightmare Before Christmas purse, and it was so beautiful and touching. I encounter people and I realize who I make movies for."

  Burton had already shown his dark side (Beetlejuice, Batman, Edward Scissorhands) before making 1993's The Nightmare Before Christmas. But still people were unprepared for the stop-motion animated opus he produced and created (and Henry Selick directed). The putrified undead take over Christmas? Is the man demented? These days Nightmare is a cult classic, "and it makes me laugh, because when we made the movie, the studio didn't even want to make a trailer," the director says in an interview while in Nassau, Bahamas (where his friend Johnny Depp is filming two Pirates Of The Caribbean movies consecutively). 

  A dozen years later, Burton is back in the stop-motion animation mode, with Corpse Bride and frankly, at this late 
actors
Johnny Depp Helena Bonham Carter
Emily Watson Albert Finney 

director
Tim Burton
Mike Johnson

outtakes
The legend of the corpse bride began as a Russian folktale in the 19th century when anti-Semitism was rampant and Jewish brides would often be ambushed and murdered on their way to the wedding chapel.

date, anybody who doesn't have a good idea of the mordant humor at work here just hasn't been paying attention. Taken from a piece of Yiddish folklore, Corpse Bride is a stylized period piece about a young dandy named Victor (voiced by Depp) who is ambivalent about his coming marriage to a sweet young thing named Victoria (Emily Watson) and in a jokey mood instead proffers his ring to a "twig" sticking out of the ground. The twig turns out to be the bony finger of a tragically deceased bride-to-be (Helena Bonham Carter) who arises and announces that they are now as good as married.

  As you can imagine, complications ensue-both in the land of the living, and the land of the dead (the latter of which, Burton brings to "life" with ghoulish glee.) We're talking about a head carried about by maggots, a chain-saw accident victim trailing entrails and all manner of vermin.

  Working piecemeal on his vision for the last three years, Burton really got on a roll while filming another recent release, his feverish take on Roald Dahl's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (which also starred Depp). Both films came together simultaneously at two different London studios.

  "It was chaotic, but it was good," Burton reveals, "because we could only work with the kids (on Charlie and the Chocolate Factory) so much during the day, so sometimes we'd work the day and then just go over to the sound booth (on Corpse Bride) and do some voice work.

  "It was easy to keep them separated. Animation is such a slow-motion process. Sometimes there'd only be only a few seconds a week to look at, so in fact, it was good in a certain way, because for me, I was obviously hardcore on Charlie, but because Corpse Bride was slower, I could have a more objective feel for it."

  Burton and Bonham Carter recently had a child together, but Burton cautions not to read anything into Charlie and a new animated film being released back to back. "It's not like I'm going to be making the Teletubbies movie or The Wiggles feature film debut any time soon. Parenthood hasn't altered my thinking. In fact, I'm more inclined to do porno films than children's movies."

- Jim Slotek