Victor (voice of Johnny Depp) and Emily (voice of Helena Bonham Carter) in “Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride.”
©2005 Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc.
Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride is back in theaters to celebrate the film’s 20th anniversary, and to help honor the stop-motion classic this weekend at The LightBox Expo — also known as LBX — are three of the film’s core artists: Carlos Grangel, Ian MacKinnon and Anthony Scott.
The 7th annual LBX, which highlights the best in animation, live-action, illustration and video games, is set to run Friday through Sunday at the Pasadena Convention Center in Pasadena, Calif. Last year’s event attracted more than 16,000 attendees and for this year’s event, only Friday and Sunday tickets remain as Saturday and weekend badges are sold out.
Grangel, Mackinnon and Scott will all take part in a special panel event on Sunday to discuss their work on Corpse Bride. Burton and Grangel created and sketched the characters, while Mackinnon (of the Manchester, England, animation production house Mackinnon and Saunders) and his team created the puppets. Scott, meanwhile, served as the production’s animation supervisor.
Corpse Bride, of course, is a Victorian era tale about Victor Van Dort (voice of Johnny Depp), a nervous groom who stumbles through his wedding rehearsal where he is set to marry Victoria Everglot (Emily Watson). While walking alone in a snow-covered forest rehearsing his lines, he places a wedding ring on what he thinks is a branch, but it turns out to be ring finger of a deceased bride, Emily (Helena Bonham-Carter). Despite the misunderstood “proposal,” Emily — the Corpse Bride — rises from the grave and presumes that the two are to be married.
Ian Mackinnon displays some of the puppets used in “Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride.”
Mackinnon and Saunders
Suddenly, Victor’s colorless Land of the Living collides headfirst into the colorful Land of the Dead and Emily is caught in the middle of the morbid madness. The film also stars the voices of Christopher Lee, Albert Finney, Joanna Lumley, Tracey Ullman, Richard E. Grant, Paul Whitehouse and Jane Horrocks.
Released in theaters on Sept. 23, 2003, perhaps the most striking aspect of Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride — which has been remastered for its theatrical re-release in 4K— is that its visual quality remains timeless, whereas the computer-animated films from 20 years ago shows the medium’s limitations. That timelessness is one of the many reasons Mackinnon — who was joined by Grangel and Scott for a recent Zoom conversation — love the medium of stop-motion animation so much.
“We as artists haven’t changed our techniques for over 100 years and we’re still shooting everything frame by frame,” said Mackinnon, who recently animated the stop-motion sequence for Burton’s series Wednesday. “I think also, with Corpse Bride and the influences on the piece we did for Wednesday, they come from classic cinema and from fairy tales, so they already have a certain sort of ageless quality to them.
“I think as we go along with designing characters and with animating, we’re all trying to keep pushing the boundary to what we’re doing with stop motion and with animation,” Mackinnon added. “And also, the audiences grow up with these films. For some people they become childhood favorites. It’s nice to see in 20, 30 years’ time, how the audiences’ appreciation of the work has grown as well.”
The Origin Of ‘Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride’
The idea of making Corpse Bride began with Joe Ranft, the late Disney-Pixar animator who, like Burton, was a CalArts alum. Ranft — who tragically died in an accident on Aug. 16, 2005, about a month before Corpse Bride was released in theaters — told Burton about the 17th century Jewish folktale The Finger, where a deceased bride rises from the grave after a groom places a ring on her finger.
To help Burton realize his vision for the film, he enlisted the help of Carlos Grangel — who runs Grangel Studio in Barcelona, Spain, with his brother, Jordi — to help design and sketch out the characters.
“The only thing that I can say is that I did not do it alone. A group of five people worked with me in Spain, helping me with everything, so I don’t take the credit for anything,” Grangel said, humbly. “The chemistry with Tim and Mike Johnson, Mackinnon and Saunders and the unit in London was great from day one.”
Among the unit on Corpse Bride, which was released by Warner Bros., were producers Allison Abbate and Derek Frey, art director Nelson Lowry and animator Trey Thomas, among several others— and Grangel said he’s as grateful as ever for all their talents.
“I kept pushing and pushing and pushing, but we got the best out of all of them,” Grangel recalled. “It was really a team effort. It was a very artistic collaboration. We were just aiming for the best. I think Tim could have done it all, but he relies on crazy people like me and my team sometimes.”
Carlos Grangel, Tim Burton and Jordi Grangel on the set of “Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride.”
Leah Gallo courtesy of LightBox Expo
And the results of the crew’s labor of love on Corpse Bride were well rewarded. Burton and his fellow director Mike Johnson were cited for the nomination for the 2005 Best Animated Feature Oscar, as well as nominations in the category from the Annie Awards, the Producers Guild of America and the Critics’ Choice Awards.
Corpse Bride has such of impact that some may argue that the film’s characters bring forth just as much if not more emotion than any characters you’d see in a live-action production.
Scott, who is humbled by the live-action comparison, said he appreciates the observation given the human touch he and his fellow animators put into the characters.
“It’s really nice to hear. We are really close to it, and we live in it every day,” Scott said. “We’re on the set and on the stage crawling around and trying to figure out how we’re going to get these puppets through their actions, walking downstairs or through doorways. So, we actually are there with them and even though we’re not in the film, we are. We are there with them.”
Of course, the irony is that some of the “live” characters are “dead” in terms of the narrative but thanks to the magic of Burton and Johnson, have an existence unto themselves.
“It’s a Gothic romance that has a grand scale to it … Like a lot of Tim’s work, when the film first came out, people were expecting, ‘Since Corpse is in the title, it was going to be dark,’ Mackinnon said. “But instead, Tim’s films celebrate the afterlife. They are joyous, there is comedy and the music — it has all the aspects of the things that Tim weaves together. You get drawn into those characters.”
2005: Ian Mackinnon, Anthony Scott, Peter Saunders display one of the Victoria puppets used in “Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride.”
Photo Courtesy Of Anthony Scott
The ‘Corpse Bride’ Trio Hopes Their LBX Panel Inspires Animators — And Studios
While Ian Mackinnon, Carlos Grangel and Anthony Scott had fun reminiscing about the film in our Zoom conversation and look forward to chatting about the film again at LBX, the trio ultimately hopes that their panel at the event will plant the seed for more animators to explore the field of stop-motion animation.
“I’ve been able to work with some of the younger animators through my Stop Motion Animation website, where they can find out how to animate, and later on, maybe end up working with them in the business,” Scott said. “This kind of event [LBX] is able to promote stop motion and tell animators that it’s still alive.
“People are still interested in being involved with it,” Scott added. “That’s amazing to me, because when I got into this business, there was not a lot of work, and you always kept hearing, ‘Stop-motion is dead.’ It was that way back in the ‘70s, even, but I was able to get into the business and work on several feature films. It’s alive and well.”
Grangel hopes that the panel event at the LBX attracts the attention of studios, too, since representatives from nearly every major studio — from Disney, DreamWorks, Sony Pictures Entertainment and 20th Century to Lucasfilm, Netflix, Skydance and Laika — attends the event.
“I would be happy to inspire producers and studios to understand that they should be doing more stop-motion movies,” Grangel said. “So, if this panel encourages to think about it, I will be the happiest person on the planet, apart from the artists. We have a legion of artists that want to work in stop-motion and some of them are waiting at their houses right now to work in it because they love this medium and I love it, too.”
2005: Tim Burton, Ian Mackinnon and Mike Johnson look at one of the Emily puppets.
Mckinnon and Saunders/Courtesty of LightBox Expo
Luckily, Grangel, Scott and Mackinnon have had the opportunity to work on more stop-motion films apart from Corpse Bride and in fact, all were key creatives on Guillermo del Toro and the late Mark Gustafson’s Oscar-winning stop-motion feature Pinocchio.
As such, Grangel, Scott and Mackinnon know the interest is there, which is a heartening thought considering that a mere 20 years ago, Mackinnon was certain that Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride would be the last stop-motion feature ever made considering the burgeoning advancements in computer animation.
Now, two decades later, the artist is happy to know he was wrong.
“They’re studying stop motion again in colleges and they’re making their own short films again,” Mackinnon said. “I think it has something to do with everybody, from the big directors and the creatives to the artists: They like to see their fingerprints on the work. They like to celebrate that handmade quality and they’re not trying to compete. This isn’t a competition of techniques. They like how people respond to the magic of seeing these inanimate objects being brought to life. If that keeps inspiring people to tell stories, that’s fantastic.”
The 7th annual LightBox Expo, created by character designer and illustrator Bobby Chiu and event organizer and filmmaker Jim Demonakos, runs Friday through Sunday at the Pasadena Convention Center. In addition to the Corpse Bride panel, the Concept Art Association will be honoring Burton with its Lifetime Achievement Award at the LBX on Saturday.
Note: Some of the quotes in this “Corpse Bride” interview feature were condensed or edited for clarity.