Blu-ray Movie Reviews

Tim Burton loves the bizarre, and his Corpse Bride (he shares director credit here with Mike Johnson) is nothing if not that.

The plot of this animated feature is simple enough. As an engaged young man wanders in the woods practicing his wedding vows, a "living" female corpse overhears him and assumes that they are now married.

Sound creepy? It really isn't. Yes, there's a lot of dark humor, but the film as a whole is a true original: endlessly fascinating, hilarious, and inspired.

The animation technique used here is stop motion—similar to Burton's A Nightmare Before Christmas. (Burton produced but did not direct the latter film, but his style was all over it). The individual frames were shot using a 35mm digital still camera, and the subjects were real models on real sets with real lighting. In that respect the film is more like a live-action production than CGI animation, except that each second of film took days to shoot! Stop motion can sometimes look a little jerky, but the motion here is so fluid that I have a hard time believing that computers were not used to smooth things out in post-production (I did not hear that issue addressed in the extra features).

The images here are pristine, and some of the most detailed I have yet seen on Blu-ray. With the right display you'll see textures in nearly everything, even tiny details in the smooth "skin" of the characters. While these might have been intentional, I suspect that they are, instead, minor imperfections in the construction of the models. But these small, visible imperfections didn't detract from my enjoyment of the film. Casual viewers will hardly notice them, but videophiles will be blown away.

The Dolby Digital sound is also superb. The dialogue is always natural sounding, the music sparkles, the surrounds are active, the bass is deep, and the ambience is convincing, particularly in an early scene in a huge foyer. The mix is also noticeably cleaner than the DD we are familiar with from DVD—likely due to the higher DD data rates we're getting on most new Blu-ray discs (up to 640kb/sec, compared to the 384kb/sec or 448kb/sec on standard DVDs).

Corpse Bride's only failing is that at 77 minutes it's far too short! It may well become an animation classic, and belongs in every fan's collection of HD discs. (It's also available on a similarly superb HD DVD---both discs were mastered using the VC-1 video codec).

(Picture: 9.5 (out of 10), Sound: 8 (DD), Film: 8.0)