CAN THE LIVING MARRY THE DEAD?
The tale of the Corpse Bride and the hapless groom she spirits away to the underworld on the eve of his earthly wedding was borne from a Russian folk tale about unintentional nuptials between an unfortunate man and a deceased bride. The romantically macabre story captured the attention and imagination of acclaimed writer/director Tim Burton, who worked for ten years to bring it to the screen as a stop-motion animated motion picture.
1993's Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas, directed by Henry Selick, was Burton's first foray into the craft of stop-motion animation. "What I love about stop-motion animation is that it's so tactile," says Burton. "There's something wonderful about being able to physically touch and move the characters, and to see their world actually exist. It's similar to making a live action film - if you're doing it all on blue screen, it doesn't give you the feeling of actually being there, which the stop-motion process does.
"After doing The Nightmare Before Christmas, I was looking for something else to do in the same medium, because I love stop-motion animation," the director continues. "It's such a special art form. Joe Ranft, a friend of mine, gave me a little short story, a couple of paragraphs from an old folk tale, and it seemed right for this particular type of animation. It's like casting - you want to marry the medium with the material. And this seemed like a good match."
"It's extraordinarily clever and it's a story that you haven't seen a hundred times before," says producer Allison Abbate, who served as artistic coordinator on Nightmare. "It certainly has the Tim Burton look, the darkness of the humor and the quirkiness of the characters. What drew me most to the script was the fact that it's such a heartbreakingly beautiful story."
Throughout his film career, Burton has created an eclectic body of work that evidences his distinct artistic style, while exploring wildly divergent stories and characters across different mediums. His numerous films include the recent hit Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, along with Big Fish, Planet of the Apes, Sleepy Hollow, Mars Attacks!, Ed Wood, Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas, Batman Returns, Edward Scissorhands, Batman, Beetlejuice and Pee-Wee's Big Adventure. It is a testament to the strength of his unique vision that these disparate films all bear the mark of Burton's inimitable style. In turns funny, poignant, terrifying and touching, all are original, inventive, and unmistakably Tim Burton.
"Tim's ideas helped bring stop-motion animation back into the public eye," says Mike Johnson, who co-directed Corpse Bride with Burton. "The Nightmare Before Christmas spawned a new generation of stop-motion fans - it has a certain texture, a presence, that just can't be achieved with computers. It's because of his interest and his passion that these big projects can get rolling."
"Mike really has a sensitivity to the medium," says Burton. "There are not many people who truly understand the process, and it's hard to communicate that to people when they don't come from that rarified world."
"I worked with Mike on The Nightmare Before Christmas," says Abbate. "He has a great sense of and love for stop-motion. It's an extraordinarily complicated, detail-oriented art form, and there's so much physical work that has to be done to literally move the project forward frame by frame. Mike inspired the group and really led them through the Herculean task of getting these shots out. You need to pace yourself, you need to inspire the crew, you need to keep your mind on twenty-six stages and hundreds of puppets, and Mike did it all."

CASTING
Voicing the film's lead characters is an incredible cast of actors, led by Johnny Depp as Victor, Helena Bonham Carter as the Corpse Bride and Emily Watson as Victoria. Depp worked simultaneously on Corpse Bride and Burton's hit film Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Many of his recording sessions took place at the end of a Charlie shoot day, when he would get out of his Willie Wonka costume and into the recording booth to voice Victor. Depp had never voiced a character in an animated film before, but the actor, a well-known Tim Burton devotee, jumped at the prospect of working with the director on both projects. Corpse Bride marks the fifth time the actor and director have united, Depp also having starred in Burton's Edward Scissorhands, Ed Wood and Sleepy Hollow.
"Tim's vision is always amazing, beyond anything you expect," says Depp. "If Tim wanted to shoot 18 million feet of film of me staring into a light bulb and I couldn't blink for three months, I'd do it."
Depp plays the hapless Victor Van Dort is a shy, dreamy young lad whose social-climbing parents have arranged his marriage to a complete stranger, the lovely Miss Victoria Everglot. Victoria is played by Emily Watson, a two-time Academy Award nominee for Best Actress for her roles in Breaking the Waves and Hilary and Jackie.
A hopeless romantic, Victoria mourns the loss of her chance to find her true love… until she meets Victor, and begins to believe that she may have found him after all.
"Victoria starts off as a sort of rather uptight, well-bred young lady who appears to be fairly timid," says Watson. "She has very snobby parents who are marrying her off to money. And it doesn't seem possible, but when she meets Victor she actually encounters a man who is shyer and more timid than she is. It's kind of a complete social car crash, but in the middle of all that they're very sweet together. Everything appears to be going swimmingly until he is snatched by the Corpse Bride who appears from the underworld."
Indeed, after Victor is banished from the wedding rehearsal until he can properly execute his vows, he stumbles off into the forest where he finally is able to say them perfectly, going so far as to place a ring on a gnarled root protruding from the ground…but as he soon discovers, he has actually betrothed himself to the Corpse Bride, who rises from the earth with his ring on her finger to take him as her groom.
Helena Bonham Carter, nominated for Best Actress in a Leading Role for her performance in The Wings of the Dove, plays the Corpse Bride, herself a true romantic who was tragically doomed to death on her wedding night. She's been waiting ever since, heartbroken and slowly decaying in the Land of the Dead, for her groom to come and claim her. When Victor inadvertently becomes that groom, she's sure she's finally found the love that was meant to be.
"She's ultimately somebody who is arrested - she's stopped, she's frozen in time," says Bonham Carter. "She's just eternally young, which is sort of a nice paradox with being so aged in her body. But there's a genuine innocence to her and a purity, and an openness. She really hopes he loves her, even though she knows there are some things she hasn't got going for her, like being alive."
When Victor is dragged below the earth to the Land of the Dead, after his initial horror he begins to discover that the life of the dearly departed has a lot to offer, especially compared to his dreary existence above. The one thing he truly values up there is Victoria, and he is determined to return to her at any cost - but he soon learns that cost will be the Corpse Bride's broken heart.
"One thing I liked about the story is that there isn't a bad guy," says Bonham Carter. "It's a really nice balance, because usually in those sort of triangular romantic situations, you know exactly who he's going to choose. But these are three very nice, sympathetic characters facing a dilemma. In a way, you want Victor to end up with both of them - you're really torn, just like Victor is."
"It's about passion, in a very strange and unusual and slightly twisted way," says Watson. "It's a kind of a ghost story, but it's very funny, with larger-than-life characters. But there's something very delicate in there as well, something very sweet and pure."
Albert Finney (Big Fish) and Joanna Lumley (Absolutely Fabulous) play Victoria's pompous father Finis Everglot and her pitiless mother Maudeline. Victor's equally unpleasant parents, the overbearing Nell Van Dort and her boorish husband William, who made his fortune in the very unfashionable profession of putting fish in cans, are played by Tracey Ullman (Tracey Takes On) and Paul Whitehouse (Finding Neverland). Esteemed actor Christopher Lee (Charlie and the Chocolate Factory) plays the coldly authoritarian Pastor Galswells, the mean-spirited cleric who first banishes Victor into the woods and into the arms of the Corpse Bride.
Longtime Burton collaborator Danny Elfman voices skeletal hep cat Bonejangles, the leader of the Skeleton band, The Skeletones, that rock the underworld nightly at the Ball and Socket Pub. It's Bonejangles and his band who musically impart the tragic tale of the Corpse Bride to a terrified Victor. Elfman also penned the film's three other songs, including the introductory number "According to Plan," in which Victor and Victoria's parents spell out their impending plans to wed their offspring for the purpose of their own self-interest.
"Like The Nightmare Before Christmas, writing songs for Corpse Bride was a real treat," says Elfman. "Tim's visuals make the perfect compliment for the kind of stuff I love doing most. These wonderfully fun, dark, offbeat tales are the perfect platform for me to write odd, slightly twisted obscure styles, such as my favorite musical era - 1930's jazz. I only hope we get to do more in the future."
Corpse Bride marks Elfman and Burton's 12th film together. Elfman's distinctively haunting music has been an intrinsic feature of films such as Edward Scissorhands, Batman, Sleepy Hollow, Beetlejuice and, of course, The Nightmare Before Christmas. Their partnership began at the beginning of Burton's career, and the two artists have complemented each other ever since.
"Long before I ever got into movies or ever thought that I would have the opportunity, I would go see Oingo Boingo in clubs in L.A., and their music was very theatrical," recalls Burton. "It was kind of weirdly like movie scores in some ways. So I always remembered that, and when I had the opportunity to make Pee Wee's Big Adventure, I asked Danny to be a part of it. It was great because neither of us had ever made a movie on that scale, so it felt like we were embarking on this at the same time, doing things we'd never done before, and I think that made a connection between us that has lasted."

STOP-MOTION ANIMATION
Stop-motion animation production is a singular art; in a sense it's similar to a live action film in that there are physical sets that must be built and dressed and actors who need to be artistically coiffed, well directed and properly lighted. But when the entire world is invented and assembled from nothing but the filmmakers' imagination - including the puppet "actors" - the similarities end and the unique aspects of the art form begin to emerge.
The process of stop-motion animation is an incredibly painstaking endeavor. The puppets are manipulated in extremely tiny increments - sometimes a mere half-millimeter at a time. Each pose is photographed as one frame, then the animators return to move the puppets in another small increment, and the process is repeated, and repeated, and repeated some more. A crew may work twelve hours to come away with a total of one or two seconds of footage at the end of the day.
Unlike in live-action film, however, in which filmmakers are stuck with the inconvenience of working with actors who can only be in one place at one time, in stop-motion they are able to duplicate their puppet actors and their sets in order to conserve time. Director Mike Johnson had the considerable responsibility of ensuring that the animation remained consistent throughout the shoot.
"Keeping everyone on the same page, making sure that everything was blending together stylistically was one of the major challenges," he remembers. "The scheduling was really difficult as well. We couldn't really give one character to one animator, which would be ideal. There were so many different shots for individual characters that everyone ends up doing a little bit with each character, so everyone has to work together to keep the look and characterizations consistent."
Luckily, with the devoted Corpse Bride team, collaboration wasn't a problem. "It can be tedious work," acknowledges Johnson, "but I think that our animators and camera crew do this because they love it. It's just the kind of thing that you have to be passionate about and willing to commit to completely."
Corpse Bride first began to take shape in the sketches Burton made to give form to the characters living in his imagination, based on the tale of the brokenhearted Corpse Bride and her unwilling spouse. He gave these rough drawings to character designer Carlos Grangel, who took Burton's ideas and ran with them. "Carlos basically took some simple sketches that I did and expanded upon them," says the director. "My sketches are often quite crude, but he was really sensitive about trying to understand what the feel and the look of it all was and then flesh them out, so to speak."
Once the script was completed, it was given to storyboard sketch artists who mapped out the entire film shot by shot, envisioning camera angles and interpreting the characters' emotions and expressions.
The actors then record the film's dialogue. As the voice recordings take place before the puppets are animated, the actor's performances play an essential part in creating the characters' personalities and setting the general tone of the film, which is then elaborated on by the work of the puppeteers. "You need both elements to really make the performance come to life," stresses director Mike Johnson. "If it's there in the voice reading, then it takes a great animator to bring it out in the puppet, but it's really a combination of the two that make for a great, final shot."
Once the actors had finished their vocal performances, those recordings were then edited to the storyboards, providing a visual map of the course the film would take in production. With this cut as a guide, set pieces were built and the process of constructing the puppets began.
Master puppet creators Mackinnon and Saunders were charged with bringing the multitude of characters - both living and dead - to life. The process begins with the creation of a metal armature, which serves as the skeleton of the puppet, providing structure and stability, and which is able to be manipulated into the full range of movements that will be required once animation has begun.
"They do such beautiful work," says Burton of McKinnon and Saunders, "and they really raised it to a new level for this film. These puppets are so real - they're very sensitive and textural. The animators need that structure that provides the subtlety and the range of emotions in order to bring them to life."
Mackinnon and Saunders invented several revolutionary new techniques for Corpse Bride. The "skin" that is placed over the armature is a foam/silicone combination that made the puppets much more durable, able to continue looking supple and colorful even after months of being continually manipulated under the hot lights. The most amazing innovation they developed, however, fundamentally and significantly changed the basic way that the puppets were animated, and took the film, and the medium itself, to a whole new level.
In the past, as in The Nightmare Before Christmas, puppets' facial expressions were animated using a series of "replacement heads," each of which provided fractional changes of expression that, when put together, created the emotion and expression that brought the character to life. It was very effective, but inherently limiting as far as the range of expression they allowed.
What Mackinnon and Saunders created was an intricate gearing mechanism, contained inside the puppet's head, which could be reached through the ears and various access points hidden in the hair. The gears are manipulated using allen keys and wrenches that change the faces in tiny increments, allowing for infinitely more poses and mouth shapes, making the characters smile, frown, raise their eyebrows - express any and all emotion, rendered in an incredibly subtle fashion.
"The mechanical working of the puppets are incredible," says Burton. "They really work like living things."
The gear mechanisms embedded in the puppets' heads meant that they would have to be about 12 inches tall, which is considerably larger than traditional stop-motion puppets. This, in turn, increased the scale of the entire production, requiring sets and props that were in proportion to the characters. However, if the buildings had been scaled correctly to the puppets, they would have been much too large and often pushed out of frame. To solve this problem, the lower parts of the buildings were scaled to match the characters, then the scale was reduced as the buildings got taller, forcing them down in perspective
"Stop-motion started out very much in people's garages with characters moving around little sets," says art director Nelson Lowry. "Corpse Bride was quite a bit different - it's pretty epic for a stop-motion film. Our exteriors went up sixteen feet and some of them were as deep as twenty-five or thirty feet. Just the sheer scope and scale and amount that we had to build was pretty phenomenal. It's nothing compared to what a live action set would be, but compared to the usual stop-motion sets they're double or triple the size."
The grand scale of the sets made the process of animating a trickier proposition, as the puppets were not always easily reached within the large settings - for example, if a character was walking down the middle of a large open courtyard. To solve this problem, the sets were designed to be as animator-friendly as possible - often the animators were hidden beneath the set with a monitor, and would pop up through a trap door after every frame, move the puppets a fraction of an inch, pull the trap door down and capture another frame.
Stop-motion animation is unique in that every single element, down to the smallest prop or set dressing, has to be specifically created by a craftsperson or artist who designed, sculpted and painted it from scratch. "We basically have to design the whole world," says Lowry. "And that's where the pre-production and the production design comes in. We considered everything from the character's clothing to the vehicles they ride in, to the homes they live in, the interiors, the wallpaper, the fittings, the door knobs, skies and landscapes. And because we built it all from scratch we had to be certain that everything had a thread running through it that united it enough so that you believe it's a real place."
The medium offers very specific challenges that may not readily occur to anyone not directly involved with the process. For instance, all props that appear onscreen must be heavily weighted enough that they don't shift from frame to frame as the animators move the puppets around the set - a shift so minute that it would not be noticed during the incremental, step-by-step animation process could become glaringly obvious when inanimate objects began shifting about in the finished film.
One effect that appears effortless onscreen but was actually extremely complicated to execute is the look of the Corpse Bride's gauzy, flowing, tattered wedding dress and veil. The fabric appears to be floating on air, which is very difficult to execute one millimeter at a time. The diaphanous look was achieved with a series of nearly invisible wires that ran through the fabric, allowing it to be manipulated in the necessary tiny increments. The veil and its accompanying flowered tiara took ten months to develop, but the end result is, undeniably, eerily breathtaking.
The effect was also enhanced by the lighting that was used on the Corpse Bride to give her a glamorous, unearthly glow. Director of photography Pete Kozachik describes his method. "My philosophy in terms of lighting for puppet animation has been that you've got to respect these puppets as the actors in a show - you've got to find their good points as well as figure out which things you shouldn't ever do with them. For instance, Victoria's got a flat face, and there were certain ways we couldn't light her, like we could with the Corpse Bride."
For the Corpse Bride's introductory shot, in which she rises out of the crumbling ground shrouded in her tattered veil above a terrified, cowering Victor, Kozachik designed a lighting scheme that would be evocative of "the cover of some lurid comic book. But once she lifted her veil, we threw everything we had at her to make her look beautiful, even though she's dead and decaying. So when she gently takes off her veil and we see her for the first time, it becomes a glamour girl shot. We threw in old tricks that they used to do with all those actresses in the forties and fifties - little eye lights on her and extra diffusion. We had three lights whose main mission was to paint a white outline around her that glowed, and the diffusion filter on the lens really took that and ran with it and spread it out like a little glow around her."

DESIGNING CORPSE BRIDE                                          LIGHTING AND PHOTOGRAPHY
MIKE JOHNSON (Director)    SCREENWRITERS JOHN AUGUST & CAROLINE THOMPSON