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 |
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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. |