Corpse Bride

Herald rating: * * *

This horror-fairytale-musical-comedy-puppet show is alternatively titled Tim Burton's Corpse Bride. That's not to differentiate it from another zombie-nuptials flick of the same name but to proclaim it as a work that springs directly from the director's supposed dark vision and background as an animator of grim sensibilities.

It arrives hard on the heels of Burton's successful Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. The Burton brand also graced the title of his last horror-fairytale-musical-comedy-puppet show, 1993's splendid The Nightmare Before Christmas.

Corpse Bride most resembles that film with its stop-motion animation but unfortunately fails to better.

Technically, it's more accomplished with the combination of its expressive puppets moved frame by frame enhanced by much digital magic. Danny Elfman's fizzy songs and a kid-friendly sense of the grotesque manage to enliven a movie which spends most of its time in a colourful netherworld of the dead.

Ironically enough, it's the grey and foreboding Eastern European/Victorian world of the living that lacks a pulse.

And together the two worlds make for a vision of gothic elegance, but something falls short in the laugh department and the lyricism of its love story.

That concerns the arranged marriage of Victor (voiced by Depp, but looking like an Adrien Brody voodoo doll) and Victoria (Watson). They finally meet at their wedding rehearsal, and instantly fall in love but when Victor can't get his vows straight he goes to practise in the woods.

There, he unintentionally ends up wed to dead gal Emily (Bonham Carter). The wedding band might rattle a little on her bony finger but she's a winsome creature, her state of mild decomposition giving her a strangely lovely blue hue.

There are complications, not the least of which is Victor not wishing to make Emily's non-life any sadder than it already is, though he's still desperate to return to the living, breathing Victoria.

But it's still a film that's not as much fun as it thinks it is. It's big on amusingly hideous decaying creatures given to rattling out song and dance numbers.

But between them Corpse Bride dies a little in its storytelling, especially as it tries to flesh out its skeletal plot.

VOICES: Johnny Depp, Helena Bonham Carter, Emily Watson
DIRECTORS: Tim Burton and Mike Burton
RATING: PG (some scenes may scare young children)
RUNNING TIME: 78 mins
SCREENING: Village Hoyts and Berkeley cinemas