The wildly creative and stunningly visual Corpse Bride once again highlights director Tim Burton's very macabre imagination. Still, does the guy ever have a happy, shiny thought?

Story

Inspired by a Russian folktale, Corpse Bride begins with the promise of a wedding. The snobby Everglots (voiced by Joanna Lumley and Albert Finney) are pushing their daughter Victoria (voiced by Emily Watson) into marrying Victor (voiced by Johnny Depp), the bachelor son of the social-climbing Van Dorts (voiced by…

The Oscar for this year's Best Animated Feature Film belongs right here, even though the ravishing goth romance that Tim Burton has conjured up in Corpse Bride isn't strictly animated in the computer-generated sense. Burton and his co-director, Mike Johnson, use the stop-motion technique, which means taking puppets -- about a foot tall -- and painstakingly moving them half a millimeter at a time to achieve a subtlety of expression beyond the range of CGI. It takes a twelve-hour work day to…