Corpse Bride

Tim Burton and Mike Johnson built this puppet feature on a gamble visible in every frame. Instead of the 35 mm film cameras stop motion had always used, it was captured on Canon digital stills bodies, a switch settled a fortnight before shooting, making it the first stop motion feature shot digitally. Mackinnon and Saunders packed tiny gears into the puppet heads: slide an Allen key into one of Victor’s ears and he smiles, slide it into the other and his face falls. That machinery decides how the picture plays. Faces are held for long stretches and feeling shifts inside one shot rather than across a cut, so rhythm depends on reading expression, not incident. The seventy seven minute length charges for this elsewhere. Victoria, the fiancée waiting among the living, is barely written, and a song was cut in production to keep things short, thinning the music badly in the last third. Johnny Depp recorded at night while spending his days on Burton’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Filming was based in London. Who it’s for: anyone content to let those Allen key faces carry the whole story unaided. Who it’s not for: anyone wanting Victoria written as fully as Emily, or weighing it up for a small child, since skeleton design never leaves screen.