It's funny because I actually saw a History of Violence and Corpse Bride one right after the other with high expectations for both, and the latter didn't come close to knocking the former off its perch. Maybe I just spent so much of my life as a Danny Elfman fan that I've worn out on spotting his re-uses of the same allusions over and over. Remember, he's been paying tribute to that Betty Boop cartoon since his theatrical days with the Mystic Knights, even before 1980's Forbidden Zone. This time the animation nods were more explicit than ever, and the design of the entire underworld environment seemed to have been taken right out of Oingo Boingo album covers. Kindof a cool idea, I guess, but it seems I've moved on and wish he would try branching out more too. If only he hadn't given a taste of what direction a "new Elfman sound" might have gone with his a Simple Plan score, I might be more forgiving of his tendency to tread water in the same sonic soup.

On the other hand, I can imagine I'd get a thrill out of sharing this stuff (minus Forbidden Zone) with a new generation of budding Elfmaniacs too.

Good points, Brian, but I should add that my reaction to Corpse Bride is almost the opposite, which I certainly haven't made clear by linking to Minnie the Moocher. What's impressed me is not so much the underworld but the bleak land of the living above. To back up, I have an irrational love for The Nightmare Before Christmas, and my fear was that Bride would simply be more of the same - not so much on the part of Elfman but of Burton with regard, first, to the overall look of the film, and then, too, with regard to the central concept. How can you beat "Halloween vs Christmas" as a family film that also more or less serves to sum up Burton's position in Hollywood?

Well, within the first few minutes of Bride, I was thrilled to have those worries just evaporate - gleefully. A good deal of credit evidently goes to Carlos Grangel, whose character designs are far more intricate and imaginative than those in Nightmare. There's much, much more than nodding to Edward Gorey and Charles Addams going on here. None of the four parents, for example, even have to speak; their characters are simultaneously immediately recognizable and entirely new exaggerated forms of Dickensian figures. Then, anchoring the whole is the gorgeous production design, the village all but drained of color, not overly wrought at all yet still, to me, reminders of Burton's penchant for German Expressionism - while the Batman films drew from Metropolis, here we have the smaller, more intimate scale of Caligari to an extent, and Nosferatu, based, interestingly enough, on a Victorian-era tale set somewhere in far off eastern Europe.

In a sense, then, we're seeing a juxtaposition of two radically different late 20s and early 30s takes on death, Murnau's vs Fleischer's. That may be going a bit far, but still.

On a different note, I've been struck this year by how literally the palettes of mainstream films have been pegged to the seasons. Batman Begins and War of the Worlds may have been pretty dark for summer movies, but they're shot through with, respectively, warm oranges and earthy browns. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire looks very November with its rainy blues and heavily overcast grays. And for Christmas, Narnia, going by the advance PR material alone, seems to share a lot, palette-wise, with Polar Express: splotches of bright color (especially reds) set against silvery white and twinkling flakes.

Anyway. Lazy thoughts on a Sunday afternoon.

I guess the above-ground stuff didn't quite wow me as much as I'd hoped either. Your writing on it makes me want to take a second look (preferably not directly after the screening of a modern masterpiece) but I hoped the film wouldn't feel quite as much like [b]Nightmare...[/b] as it did, and that goes for the design too. Though technically much more impressive, the shapes and movement hearkend back to the Selick film more than I'd hoped. The different color palette wasn't enough for me. But like I said, I probably wasn't in the best place to appreciate what I was seeing. On the other hand, I couldn't help but notice in the MTV piece Helena Bonham Carter's complaints about Burton's total lack of royalty from the explosion of merchandising for the film. That set off a few alarm bells that perhaps there was a dictate to make puppts that looked like the hot-selling NMBC figures, without making them so similar as to be legally questionable. Ah, cynical me.

No, I think your cynicism's healthy, Brian. At the same time, if Burton & Co were going straight for the merchandizing dollar, they'd have chosen a different story and a different approach. In other words, Corpse Bride is far less immediately appealing to kids than Nightmare.

On a different note, it's always struck me that if Helena Bonham Carter didn't exist, Tim Burton would make her from scratch.