GRAVE YARD SMASH

REVIEWED - CORPSE BRIDE: Death becomes an outstanding vocal cast in Tim Burton's lively stop-motion horror- comedy-musical, writes Michael Dwyer

Life after death is much more fun than what precedes it, according to the delightful and inventive entertainment that is Tim Burton's Corpse Bride.

This enchanting stop-motion animated musical is set in a vaguely Victorian era when plans for an arranged marriage are thrown into utter disarray by an intervention from the afterlife.

Johnny Depp provides the voice of Victor Von Dort, the timid pianist son of nouveau riche fish tycoons (Paul Whitehouse and Tracey Ullmann), with Emily Watson as his fiancee, Victoria Everglot, the shy daughter of unbearably snooty old-money aristocrats (Albert Finney and Joanna Lumley), who secretly are strapped for cash, old or nouveau.

Nervously practiscing his complicated wedding vows, Victor unwittingly becomes betrothed to the Corpse Bride (Helena Bonham Carter), who rises Carrie-style from the grave, setting in motion a snowballing sequence of uproarious complications in the here and the hereafter. Meanwhile, the Everglots find a potential alternative suitor for Victoria in the sinister form of Lord Barkis Bittern (Richard E Grant).

Burton, who started out in film as a Disney animator and first ventured into stop-motion puppetry with The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993), has produced a triumph of imagination and animation. The voice cast is impeccably chosen and adds immeasurably to the richness of the fantasy. Depp, the only American actor among the British principals, sports a perfectly precise upper-class English accent.

We share in Burton's relief and relish when he cuts from the grey gloom that pervades the Land of the Living and gets stuck into its wild and crazy mirror image in the Land of the Dead, as if all the colour had been drained from one land into the other. This is, of course, the opposite of the natural process, and so it follows that the Land of the Dead is inhabited by all-singing, all-dancing skeletons that are, well, full of life.

The songs are witty and spirited, penned by Burton's composer-in-residence, Danny Elfman, the former Oingo Boingo vocalist who doubles as the singing voice of Bonejangles, the leader of the Skeletones at the pub that never closes in the Land of the Dead. It can only be a matter of time and re-design before Corpse Bride is turned into a Broadway musical.

Children attending this magical movie should be advised that accompanying adults may well enjoy it even more than they do.

Directed by Mike Johnson and Tim Burton. Voices of Johnny Depp, Helena Bonham Carter, Emily Watson, Tracey Ullman, Joanna Lumley, Albert Finney, Richard E Grant, Michael Gough, Jane Horrocks, Christopher Lee PG cert, gen release, 77 min