Corpse bride, a trip to the past…

September 8, 2007 at 11:27 pm (Uncategorized)

Films definitely had evolved with the new tools and techniques that incredible directors and producers have implemented over the years. We could realise the advances of the film industry by comparing the first movie Sortie des Usines Lumière à Lyon (Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory) by the Lumière Brothers in 1895 to the movies we see nowadays and their advanced special effects and realistic film techniques. It is because of this that stop motion films like Corpse bride call the attention of people.

Stop motion (or frame-by-frame) animation is an animation technique in which static objects seem to move, similarly to the first movies made in the 1890s, in which still photos were projected very quickly in order to appeared to be in motion, This technique is achieved by moving the object little by little between frames that are individually phootographed. When the series of frames are played as a continuous sequence the effect of motion is produced. Although this technique can be used with any object, clay puppets are the favorite ones due to their ease of repositioning; when the stop motion technique is used with clay it is called claymation, which is what people could see in Corpse bride. It was Georges Méliès, who turned moving pictures into moving stories, and Corpse bride uses some of the devices he created like the fade out and fade in, and the dissolve of some of the characters providing a unique narrative to the movie similar to watch a theatrical play.

The use of stop-motion photography, also developed by Méliès, set the origin of animation films, which are mostly directed to children, but as this movie, they can be seen by all kind of people. The earliest animated film ever made was Humorous Phases of Funny Faces (1906) by newspaper cartoonist J. Stuart Blackton; however, it did not used the same technique as stop motion, it used 2-D images of cartoons in different positions in order to create the illusion of movement in a flip book, which was the first animation device. Afterwards in 1939 appeared the first full-length animated classic Show White and the seven Dwarfs which included the use of color and sound, and later, during the golden Age of Hollywood animation in the 1940s, Disney created another successful animated film which was Fantasia in 1940, thanks to the use of well-developed techniques that combined classical music and animation. It is this combination that attracted Tim Burton to work with classical music and music in general.

Corpse bride, as well as other stop motion films, uses musicals with original lyrics that gives even more life to the clay puppets making it more “realistic” to the audience. As well as fantasia, the classical music also plays an important role in the film setting the mood in each scene and providing life to the characters actions and emotions. It is true that animated films nowadays are not what they used to be, along with 3-d animation and computer-graphics imaging (CGI) it has evolved into a new era, but it is good to know that there are still movies that preferred to go back into the roots of film and animation in order to make even greater pieces of art as Corpse bride.