Despite our recent pounding by another Tim Burton movie, we were hoping for another Nightmare before Christmas. What we got was even more of a trifle. The animation was excellent, but the story was amazingly thin. You have no back story for any of the characters, which makes the sudden love between Vincent and Victoria (the main characters, whose wedding is complicated by the titular Corpse Bride) hard to swallow. We can only speculate that Tim Burton started with the emergence of the Corpse Bride and worked out from there ... then lost interest in the story itself (which is one of his unfortunate trademarks).
The end result felt like highlights from a longer, better movie. And like many "musicals" these days, the musical portions could easily have been ommitted without affecting the movie. Worse, several of the musical numbers were so crowded and noisy that you couldn't make out what any of the characters were singing.
What's with all these passive protagonists? This is all too common in animation it seems ... characters who are along for the ride, too timid to affect anything until, perhaps, they show some backbone in the final reel.
This movie is most notable for technical achievements; it was shot onto digital SLRs and editted using Final Cut Pro. In addition, several scenes show animated characters playing piano (one piano is branded as a "Harryhausen") which was incredibly ambitous. But that doesn't make it a great movie, just a rental.
