Before watching the movie:
I remember when this movie came out and being mildly interested but not very motivated to see it. It looked like an attempt to make another The Nightmare Before Christmas. And then I found it in my roommate’s open use DVD collection and thought maybe I’d watch it, but then maybe it would be good to blog about, but it would be a while before it would be old enough to cover.
And then I didn’t watch it, and about I moved out of that apartment, and then about ten years happened and I’m still blogging, so here’s my time to review it.
Still looks like a less magical Nightmare.
After watching the movie:
The Van Dorts, a new-money fishmonger family, are desperate to marry their son Victor into the aristocracy and so cement their social status, while the bankrupt landowners the Everglots need a cash infusion and if they can get marry off their daughter Victoria, so much the better. Both couples insist to their reluctant children that knowing, let alone liking, their intended is the very least important ingredient of a good marriage, and so the betrothed don’t meet until their wedding rehearsal. And a miracle happens, because these two horrible parenting teams produced good natured children who manage to find a spark of common interest and tenderness in the few minutes they’re accidentally left alone together. Now that Victor and Victoria actually want to get married, however, Victor is so nervous and clumsy with his vows at the rehearsal that the priest declares that the wedding must be cancelled unless Victor can learn his lines by morning. Determined, Victor wanders through the woods outside of town practicing, and just when he gets them perfect, a corpse in a wedding gown springs out of the earth, accepts those vows, and drags him to the Land of the Dead as her new husband. The other dead souls explain to Victor that this is Emily, who years ago waited in that spot with her family fortune to elope with her lover, only to be robbed and murdered, but she kept waiting for her husband there, and as Victor’s practice vow was so compelling and he put the ring on what turned out to be her dessicated finger, she believes they’re now married. Meanwhile up above, the scheming Lord Barkis is taking the opportunity of Victor’s disappearance in the arms of a mystery lady to suggest that Victoria might be better off married to someone of his own stature.
This always seemed to me like an attempt to prove that Tim Burton could make a Nightmare Before Christmas without Henry Selick, the director of Burton’s two previous animated films. Selick went on to direct Coraline without Burton and I think that was the clear winner between the two, but that’s not to say this is a waste of time. Victor, Victoria, and Emily are charming, engaging characters. Unfortunately, everyone else is flatter than flat, caricatures with little personality not provided by their visual design or the actors.
The songs here are also not too memorable. The only one I could hum a bit of is “According to Plan”, which introduces the two families’ need for an alliance, and I think it’s relatively short but it still overstays its welcome. I don’t think anybody is going to be seeking out the soundtrack album.
The Land of the Dead seemed a little uninspired. It had a handful of stylized characters but mostly a lot of generic skeletons, and almost none of them had noticeable personality. The scenery is a lot of rundown old plaster town with plenty of coffin imagery thrown in regardless of whether it makes sense. I feel like Coco had a similar design starting point but did much better fleshing it out.
On the one hand, I was for a while earnestly unsure how the triangle conflict was going to resolve. Emily is too charming to want to see her get dumped, but it was hard to tell how we were going to get Victor and Victoria back together without hurting her. On the other, the goings on in the land of the living were highly telegraphed. I knew everything Barkis was going to do or be revealed as at least two scenes before it happened.
This had a lot of potential but seems like it didn’t really arrive fully formed. There are so many notable names in the cast (I think this is about the time everyone realized that Burton always casts Depp and Carter in his stuff), but except for Depp and Carter and maybe Richard E. Grant, they’re all pretty underused, especially Christopher Lee. There’s a beating heart inside and I’d watch it again, but it seems like something that won’t be becoming a common tradition like some others I could mention again. In comparison, this feels like an early draft of something better.
Yesterday's Movies 