Weird, dark and silly was good to Tim Burton in 2005.
OK, weird, dark and silly are always good to Burton.
The 47-year-old director-producer has made a career - and a hugely successful one, at that - out of a fondness for the dark side and taste for the surreal.
It started in the mid-'80s with Burton's much-admired Pee-wee's Big Adventure and continued with a string of thematically and stylistically consistent hits and blockbusters, including Beetle Juice, Batman, Edward Scissorhands, the superb Ed Wood, Sleepy Hollow (a Halloween tradition at my house), and his two stop-motion animation greats, The Nightmare Before Christmas and James and the Giant Peach. There are been misses - the brutal Planet of the Apes remake - but they are infrequent.
For those who share his sensibility or have acquired his tastes, Burton is the modern master of the macabre.
It may surprise some, but Burton is not what you might expect in person - that is, he's not a brooding middle-aged goth trying to commune with the dead. I met him one time, during interviews for Sleepy Hollow, and found an upbeat, friendly and very bright film professional who is aware of his image - and manipulates it to his advantage - but is also a hard-charging type-A personality who brings in multimillion-dollar projects on budget and on time. Burton understands the old maxim about it not being "show fun,'' but "show business.''
And business was good last year. Teaming up again with Johnny Depp, previously a collaborator in Edward Scissorhands, Ed Wood and Sleepy Hollow, Burton was behind the Willy Wonka remake, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and the stop-animation delight, Corpse Bride. Charlie earned $209 million US in North America - like I said business is good - while Corpse Bride hauled in nearly $54 million.
That's a big number for a stop-animation film and you can account for a sizable portion of that revenue because of the Tim Burton factor - after all, the formal title of the film is Tim Burton's Corpse Bride. (Earlier this week, the film earned an Oscar nomination as best animated feature film - it will compete against Wallace & Gromit in the Curse of the Were-Rabbit and Howl's Moving Castle).
Burton films have a built-in fan following - add Depp and you have a bigger built-in fan following.
Depp is not the star of Corpse Bride, even if he has the lead voice. Oh, he's good as the meek groom, Victor Van Dort, but voice-wise he's in tough with a cast that includes such large voice personalities as Albert Finney, Christopher Lee, Absolutely Fabulous's Joanna Lumley and Burton's partner Helena Bonham Carter, in the title role.
Victor is to be married to Victoria (Emily Watson), a young woman he has never met. His future in-laws (Lumley and Finney) don't take to Victor, and the minister (Lee), who is to marry the couple, doesn't much like him, either.
Victor vacates the stuffy premises, talking a walk in the woods, and through a little twist I won't reveal ends up with a new, albeit cadaverous, bride, who takes him down to meet her friends in the land of the dead.
Tim Burton's bailiwick, all right.
The land of the dead is rife with interesting and, um, lively types, and Corpse Bride is funny, looks spectacular with light and shadow playing across gorgeous sets and has to be the highest expression of the art of stop-motion animation.
It's a treat - a dark treat, of course.
So what does maestro Burton do to follow his great '05? A film about Robert Ripley, the man behind Ripley's Believe It or Not that may star Jim Carrey in the title role.
A film about a man obsessed by the strange and unusual, by a man obsessed by ... you get the drift - '06 is going to be a good year, too.
Corpse Bride - original rating: 4 SUNS (out of 5); DVD rating: 4 SUNS
