Tim Burton's Corpse Bride

[Myxo]

i hope this doesn't turns into an excuse to sell shitloads of products and toys and clothing just like the nightmare before christmas did. it's ridiculous.

EVERYTHING is an excuse to sell shitloads.

Indeed.

[Dtm115300]

Looks great. Im looking forword to this one, much more then "Chocolate Factory."

[MacGuffin]

New Trailer here.

[Ghostboy]

Best movie of the year race is now down to The New World and this.

[hedwig]

..,
cool

[cron]

i hope this doesn't turns into an excuse to sell shitloads of products and toys and clothing just like the nightmare before christmas did. it's ridiculous.

here we go:

http://www.spawn.com/toys/series.aspx?series=276

[MacGuffin]

Comic-Con 2005: Tim Burton's Corpse Bride Panel
Another helping of delicious macabre from the creators of Nightmare Before Christmas. We've seen new footage and report!
 
Fans of Nightmare Before Christmas have waited a long time for a spiritual sibling to that stylishly-crafted spot motion animation masterpiece. Tim Burton's Corpse Bride is that very movie, another stop-motion concoction with the same sense of macabre style and black humor. At this year's Comic-Con, producer Allison Abatte and Director Mike Johnson spoke about the film before screening a lengthy musical clip.

Several technological innovations have been made since Nightmare, but the panelists were adamant about their desire to work without CG. To do everything current audiences are expecting, puppets had to be made to handle all the complex movements. "We have a full… animated head on this [movie]," Johnson said, adding, "The corpse bride was such a complicated puppet that animators said it was like working with three puppets."

One thing that helped speed up the production was the introduction of new camera methods. In addition to fully armatronned rigs (which allow the camera to move around its subject three-dimensionally), Johnson said, "We shot Corpse Bride using digital still cameras… so that helped a lot."

The panel featured a sneak peek at one of the new film's musical numbers, a musical explanation of the origin of the bride, as performed by Danny Elfman. Portrayed as a signing skeleton in a horrorshow bar, the hepcat bonedaddy delivers a Cab Calloway-esque performance while other skeletons accompany him on various instruments. At different points during the song, he grabs bones and skulls from other skeletons and uses them as musical instruments, and the entire bar is included in the storytelling action. A rousing sequence, it is one of four in the film, so "a lot less than Nightmare, according to Abbate.

The visual style, as with Nightmare, has an Edward Gorey feel, but this time out, the production feels a lot slicker. There is still the tactile, hands-on look of the previous film, but overall, there is a polish and smoothness to all of the animation. The sets the production team has created are amazing, from the crowded jazz bar to the lonely forest populated with towering trees and gnarled branches.

Once the clip played to rousing cheers, audience members were invited to ask questions of the two-person panel. While many of the questions were technical, others bordered on whimsical. When asked if Jack Skellington might make a guest appearance in the film, Abatte laughed off the question and said, "His agent wouldn't let him out of his contract."

[MacGuffin]

A manual labor of love
With "Corpse Bride," Tim Burton returns to the painstaking stop-motion technique of his earlier "Nightmare." "It feels like a lost art form," he says. Source: Los Angeles Times



Every bride-to-be needs someone to turn to for sage counsel as the big day nears.

But only in "Tim Burton's Corpse Bride" could that traditional movie role be played by a maggot that lives in one of the bride's eyes. And only in stop-motion animation could the slimy creature be portrayed by a handmade puppet whose innards are actually filled with Swiss-watch-quality gears.

"He's inspired by Peter Lorre — an homage to the old horror films," explained co-director Mike Johnson as he inspected the puppet vault at 3 Mills Studio, in an industrial section of East London, where the movie was crafted. "He's kind of a twisted Jiminy Cricket-type voice of wisdom — when she's troubled, he pops out of her eye socket and offers some advice."

Today's movie audiences are more sophisticated than ever, and accustomed to action-packed films that follow explosion with explosion, but Burton still believes that fans can be lured by a story told at a stately pace using old-fashioned animation techniques developed decades ago.

It is a gamble costing nearly $40 million, but one with a built-in safety net — the legion of Burton-philes who adored "The Nightmare Before Christmas," his last stop-motion feature, which earned more than $50 million after its 1993 release and is still going strong on DVD. With its cult following, "Nightmare" remains a merchandising bonanza: A video game is being readied for fall release.

Warner Bros.' "Corpse Bride," which opens Friday in Los Angeles, represented a huge time commitment for Burton and his inner circle, who were also busy readying the summer hit "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory." Production took roughly three years because stop-motion animation is so challenging — each of the puppets must be carefully moved between frames, a process that taxes the stamina and goodwill of everyone involved.

Like most Tim Burton stories, "Corpse Bride" is a familiar tale with a macabre twist. It's a traditional love triangle, except that one of the protagonists happens to be dead, which proves a considerable inconvenience. Johnny Depp provides the voice for Victor, the timid protagonist whose puppet bears a strong resemblance to Depp, and Helena Bonham Carter, Burton's wife, plays the passionate, love-starved corpse bride.

Much of the visual and thematic power stems from the contrast between the drab, Victorian-era Land of the Living and the more colorful Land of the Dead, with Depp's character caught somewhere in between.

"We are sort of doing a reversal, making the Land of the Living seem much more dead, more muted, a humorless society," said Burton. "And the Land of the Dead is more upbeat and more emotional. It stems from growing up feeling slightly repressed, in a suburban kind of way, with not much emotion shown, and looking at the Day of the Dead in Mexico, where they treat death as part of life instead of treating it as bland and dark. I just preferred other cultures, where they treat it as a celebration of life, not a negative."

Burton had wanted to make a stop-motion follow-up to "Nightmare Before Christmas" for more than a decade but waited for a story that was the right fit with the unusual technique, which has been eclipsed in the eyes of most filmmakers by computer-generated animation.

"I just grew up loving the handmade quality and beauty of stop-motion," he said. "It reminds you that movies are an art form, not a business. It feels like a lost art form, with the beauty of the puppets."

Despite the detailed work required, Burton's crew knows that stop-motion has usually been sniffed at by animation connoisseurs, who prefer the more traditional methods pioneered by Disney or cutting-edge computerized imagery.

"I think computer-generated animation can make really appealing, great movies, but people get so locked in they say other types of animation are dead, and that is upsetting to me," Burton said.

The industry consensus that stop-motion's days are numbered is probably a result of the way the technique was used in its early days, primarily for horror films, said Pete Kozachik, the director of photography on both "Corpse Bride" and "Nightmare Before Christmas."

He said the best-known example of stop-motion is probably the classic "King Kong" sequences, which were pathbreaking at the time.

Kozachik said many older viewers find stop-motion films too strange to enjoy, but that the younger generation raised on MTV is more visually astute and able to judge a stop-motion film as a story that rises or falls on its own merits.

"The process has always been a niche and has not always been well-respected," he said. "It used to be used as the only tool to make giant monsters in horror films. It's got a certain look that is less than perfectly real. There is a weird, surreal, expressionistic quality about it."

The filmmakers believe they have a secret weapon in this regard: the corpse bride herself. Her charisma and sexiness carry the show, Kozachik said.

"She is an enigma for most of the film," he said. "She starts out as kind of a ditz, and at some point she has an epiphany. I think most red-blooded men are going to find her just fine, even if she is dead."

THE METHOD, THE MADNESS

BURTON has toyed with the idea of constantly keeping a stop-motion feature in production but concluded that it only makes sense to use the technique when there is a perfect match between the story and the antiquated technique.

"I don't know why, but these animated films feel very personal," he said. "It's easier for me to feel stronger about than a live-action film. Part of the joy of doing it is remembering why you like to make films."

Burton's commitment to the project is obvious, but the reality is that the director had been busy on "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory" and left much of the day-to-day supervision to co-director Johnson, a "Nightmare Before Christmas" veteran blessed with the patience needed to work with teams of animators month after month.

"We're trying to get the best of both worlds," said Johnson. "We're hoping that it holds up as a dramatic story to the level that a live-action Victorian period piece would, and we want the fun and gags and visual things that go with stop-motion. It's a balancing act. Hopefully it works on both levels."

Johnson admits that the stop-motion animation system is "archaic" in an age when viewers are accustomed to super-smooth computer-generated effects, but he remains a devotee.

He said the planned release of "Corpse Bride" this fall, and the release of an Aardman Animations stop-motion film, represent something of a revival in the field. It has been about five years since the last stop-motion feature, DreamWorks' "Chicken Run."

"You have to be crazy to do this," he said. "There are probably between 50 and 100 people in the world who actually make a living doing stop-motion. There aren't many opportunities to do it at this level, so people really come running."

The process is improving because of high-tech materials, he said, citing the way the new generation of silicon skin reacts to light much as human skin does, giving the art director many more possibilities.

A THREE-YEAR COMMITMENT

JOHNSON credits Burton for coming up with the film's concept and look and says his job is to realize Burton's vision. "He oversees the shots and the storyboards and has final say on everything," says Johnson.

The tall, tapered puppets have a distinct Burton look, but many require special rigging because their feet and ankles are too small to support their body weight. Shooting on the puppet-sized stages has been incredibly slow, averaging just two minutes of film per week.

That means a long-term commitment is needed — three years' worth of soggy sandwiches from the nearby supermarket that is the only lunch option in the drab section of East London where the studio is located.

"The thing that makes it the hardest is you are using real sets, real lights, real fabrics, and some of these puppets couldn't even sit down unless you designed them to do it, so we really had to know what each character was going to do before the puppet was designed," said producer Allison Abbate, another "Nightmare" alum. "The magic is that the puppets are really doing all those things you see them do."

Her task is complicated by the large number of sets and scenes that have to be successfully coordinated if the production pace is to be maintained. The goal all along was to release the film late in September 2005 to capitalize on the upcoming Halloween season.

"We have 35 sets and 25 animators, and every set is like its own little movie," she said. "The director has to be in 35 places at once."

The English-made puppets are remarkable. The lead puppets cost about $30,000 each to produce, and a full-time maintenance team is on set to keep them in action. Each miniature head has translucent silicon skin and gears hidden inside so that smiles, smirks and other facial expressions can be produced.

The baseball-size heads, the smallest ever made for this purpose, are extremely delicate and precise. The merest unwanted move can destroy a scene's continuity, giving the animators fits and throwing off the crucial Halloween timetable.

That leads to skills not normally needed on a movie set. Shannon O'Neill, for example, is trained as a jeweler, but she spent her time working on the puppets' facial mechanics. By putting a tiny Allen wrench into the Corpse Bride's ear, for example, O'Neill can turn a gear and get the main character to smile or open her mouth to speak, and can even manipulate her eyebrows.

"I never needed glasses until I worked on these," she said, gingerly adjusting the bride's eyebrows, which are mounted on tiny ball-and-socket joints.

Another example of the painstaking work required is a wedding cake from the Land of the Dead that is decorated with 50 skulls and some bones. It took four craftsmen about seven days to make the prop, which has to be rigged internally so that it can seem to move naturally when it is carried by a crew of skeletons.

All anticipated motions have to be planned for ahead of time. The cake had to be constructed in a way that these motions could be carried out without destroying it.

It is a considerable expenditure of time and money for an item that will only be on screen for about eight seconds.

[Ghostboy]

Press screening this week can't wait etc

Also, for all you Apple fans, this is the lastest of an ever-increasing number of films edited in Final Cut Pro.

[Ravi]

Press screening this week can't wait etc

Looking forward to your etc.

[polkablues]

"Tim Burton, fresh off playing Peter Petigrew in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban..."


Oh, this isn't "The Caption Thread."  My bad.

[Ravi]

Hey, he looks kind of like my avatar.

[modage]

i saw this tonite.  tim burton was there.  

i'm anxious to hear what ghostboy thought...

[The Perineum Falcon]

Well what did you think?

[MacGuffin]

Burton Heads to Altar in 'Corpse Bride'

The dead bride, Helena Bonham Carter, wore a brown sweater and frilly olive skirt. Jittery groom Johnny Depp wore white pants and a gray T-shirt. Wedding singer Danny Elfman was all in black. Matchmaker Tim Burton wore a blue shirt and black slacks.

The key players of "Tim Burton's Corpse Bride" sat down at the Toronto International Film Festival to share recollections of their strange and wondrous animated matrimonial fantasy and ponder why it is they all collaborate so often.

"With all of these people here, it's nice because it feels like a real artistic collaboration," "Corpse Bride" director Burton said in an interview with The Associated Press, alongside co-director Mike Johnson, voice stars Depp and Bonham Carter and composer Elfman, who also wrote the movie's songs and sang one of them.

"It's a movie industry, it's a business. It's treated as a business, but I think everybody here likes to think they're making art. You want to be creative, and you respond to people who have that spirit. That's a real joy, and that's the reason that I like working with these people."

"And trust," adds Bonham Carter. "It takes a long time to trust someone. You work with people, anybody you don't know, it takes about a film's length to get to know each other. Then if you move on, you have to start right back at the beginning. But if you carry on together and try doing different things, you can all grow together."

After playing the Toronto festival, "Corpse Bride" debuts in limited release Friday and opens nationwide Sept. 23.

Burton and Elfman have collaborated on 12 films, among them "Edward Scissorhands," "Batman" and "Batman Returns," "Beetlejuice," "Big Fish" and this summer's hit "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory."

Along with playing Willy Wonka in "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory," Depp's five Burton films include "Edward Scissorhands" and "Sleepy Hollow."

After getting his big Hollywood break as an assistant on the animated fantasy "Tim Burton's the Nightmare Before Christmas," Johnson was invited to co-direct the filmmaker's latest stop-motion adventure.

Since co-starring in Burton's remake of "Planet of the Apes," Bonham Carter went on to appear in "Big Fish" and "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory."

"And they had a child," Depp slyly adds, to round out Burton and Bonham Carter's collaborations.

After Burton and Bonham Carter met on "Planet of the Apes," they became a couple and had a son in 2003. They live in adjoining houses in London.

This time out, Depp provides the voice of Victor, the son of fish merchants hoping to raise their social status by marrying their boy off to the daughter (Emily Watson) of penniless but titled aristocrats.

Yet the nervous bridegroom, who can't master his vows during wedding rehearsal, inadvertently finds himself conjugally joined to the decomposing cadaver of a woman (Bonham Carter) buried in her bridal gown, who has been waiting for a hubby to come and claim her.

The film was created using intricate puppets shot in stop-motion animation, one frame at a time, the same process used on "Nightmare Before Christmas."

Elfman recalls Burton describing "Corpse Bride" about six years ago. As with all of Burton's fanciful tales, Elfman felt certain his musical approach and the director's storytelling style would click.

"Whatever it is, I know there's going to be some sensibility that's a little bit askew and that enables me to catch ahold, and I know it's going to be a good ride," Elfman said.

Since "Edward Scissorhands," Depp has had a champion in Burton, who kept coming back to the actor even though Hollywood had its doubts.

"I feel very lucky to have been along for the ride," said Depp, whose choice of odd and uncommercial roles had made him a tough star to cast until he scored a blockbuster with "Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl."

"Lucky to get the gigs from him, because I know over the years, he has had to have a great number of battles to get to cast me. Fighting the studio heads. `You mean the weird guy who does the European art movies? No, he's box-office poison.' Tim would go in and battle for me, so I feel very lucky."

Burton no longer had to beg to cast Depp because of his sudden box-office success. In fact, for "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory," the studio bosses suggested Depp for Willy Wonka "before I could even utter the words," Burton said. "I just thought, `What took you guys so long? It's about time.'"