Ahoy, squirts! Quint here with my opinion on the San Diego Comic-Con's presentation of:
THE CORPSE BRIDE
Tim Burton introduced the CORPSE BRIDE panel, which had one producer from the film (Allison Abbate) and Mike Johnson, co-director with Tim Burton. They seemed happy to be there, but very nervous in front of the 6500 geeks.
Burton was totally Burton in the clip. Weird, a little creepy, but totally geeky. He said the normal "I wish I was there" stuff and introduced the clip.
This was a really long clip, starting with Depp's character, Victor, wandering through the bare woods beating himself up a bit for making a mess of a rehearsal dinner. He couldn't get his vows right, you see... and apparently he set his mother in law on fire somehow.
This is the scene we see in the trailer where he puts the ring on a twig as he finally gets over his Johnny Depp stammering eccentrics and pulls his Johnny Depp charm and says everything perfectly right.
Little does he know that he just put a ring on the finger of a corpse, who raises from the dead (creepily, but the way... very zombie like, with her arm (the one that's not torn off by a panicking Victor) violently grabbing the top soil, fingers digging in, before she raises out of the grave) and says, "I do."
Victor runs and is chased. The animation here is beautiful on the Bride, her dress flowing, her vail flowing and with the way they chose to light her... beautiful and ethereal. There's a shot of her cresting a hill where she's backlit, with the light shining through her tattered wedding dress that took my breath away.
She catches up to Victor, kisses him and he passes out.
He awakes in the land of the dead, it seems and meets a whole cast of zombie characters in a dead bar. There's a Napoleon-like midget, the maggot that lives in the Bride's head that'll pop her eye out (like he's opening a door, I guess) when he wants to join in the conversation, and the super cool Bone Jangles, a skeleton singer that tells the Bride's story in a Cab Calloway meets Oingo Boingo song. Of course, Bones is voiced by Danny Elfman.
This musical number isn't as instantly classic as the best songs in A NIGHTMARE BEFORE CHRISTMAS, but it's really damn catchy and the scat that Bones Jangles does is just awesome.
Oh, and Johnny Depp's Victor at one point in the bar picks up the Napoleon-like midget by the handle of the sword sticking out of his back, lifting the little bugger off the ground and using it to try to fend off the dead that surrounds him... who, by the way, are just having a drink and couldn't care less... saying, "I've got a dwarf and I'm not afraid to use him!" Great line... another good one is one of the dead hags asking him if he has a dead brother.
TIDBITS:
From the panel we got a few tidbits...
-The Bones Jangle song we were shown was one of 4 musical numbers in the movie.
-There will be some cameos in the film, but no Jack Skellington ("His agent wouldn't let him out of his contract," said Allison Abbate).
-The stop-motion was done using digital still cameras, but the amount of time it takes to capture frames for the film is about the same as the amount of time it took them on A NIGHTMARE BEFORE CHRISTMAS.
-The Corpse Bride is like animated 3 different characters, according to the animators, thanks to her vail, dress and hair.
There you have it. CORPSE BRIDE looked great to me. With each new trailer or bit of footage I see it just feels more and more like the promise of what this movie could be is being kept. I mean, this is an animated kids film about a murdered woman who, as a zombie, tries to marry a living man. Too cool.
Time to post the HARRY POTTER AND THE GOBLET OF FIRE footage description... See ya' there!
-Quint
