Tim Burton’s stop-motion fairytale, Corpse Bride, is an animated marvel: a terrific puppet fantasy about a young groom, Victor (Johnny Depp), who accidentally pops a wedding ring on the skeletal finger of a ghostly bride, Emily (Helena Bonham Carter). Instead of marrying Emily Watson, the shy daughter of impoverished and pompous aristocrats, Victor is whisked to the underworld to cement a union with a woman who is literally falling apart at the seams. Her right eyeball keeps popping out to reveal a maggot with Jiminy Cricket tendencies and a face as mournful as Peter Lorre’s.

The graveyard humour is trumped by the visual magic. The chilly “real” world of Victor’s nouveaux riches parents and their insufferable hosts, the Everglots (juicily voiced by Albert Finney and Joanna Lumley), is at comic odds with the pubby carnival atmosphere enjoyed by Emily’s rotting brethren. A boozy soldier props up the bar with a cannonball hole through his rib-cage. The head waiter is a skull mounted on an army of scarab beetles. And the Corpse Bride herself is a yearning febrile mix of bone, flesh and tattered wedding gown.

The subtle joy is how Burton inverts the two worlds. The stuffy, dastardly land of the living is a shadowy and threatening place, where people nit-pick about class, and scheme for money — with the glowing exception of Watson’s jilted fiancée Victoria. In thrilling contrast, the decomposing zombies have no such hang-ups. Their crypt-like world is as colourful as a Mexican Day of the Dead. Ironically, Depp’s bashful hero Victor — trapped in romantic no-man’s land — is the unlikely voice of sanity.

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