Corpse Bride (2005)

Synopsis: A young man about to get married accidentally speaks his vows next to a deceased woman. She then claims him as her husband.
Appraisal: The animation is top quality, very stylish and aesthetically pleasing; the premise of the movie -- more on that subject ahead -- is ingenious; the individual set-pieces, however, vary in quality and the songs are unmemorable; the overall spectacle is interesting and entertaining yet not enthralling. Now, credit where credit is due. The Wikipedia -- where would we be without it? -- entry for this film tells us it is "based loosely on a 19th century Russian-Jewish folktale version of an older Jewish story". I quote the entire "Origins" section of that page:
"The origin of the folktale can be traced back to Rabbi Isaac Luria of Safed, a 16th century mystic. In the original folktale, "The Finger," the "corpse bride" in question is not a deceased woman, but a demon. In the 19th century Russian-Jewish adaptation, a woman is killed on her wedding day and is buried in her wedding gown. Later, a man on his way to his own wedding sees her ring finger poking out of the ground and thinks that it's a stick. As a joke, he puts his bride's wedding ring on the finger and dances around it, singing and reciting his marriage sacrament. The woman's corpse emerges from the ground (with the man's ring on her finger) and declares herself married to the man.
The folktale adaptation was born of the anti-Jewish Russian pogroms of the 19th century, in which young women were said to have been ripped from their carriages and killed on the way to their weddings. The folktale usually ends with the rabbis deciding to annul the corpse's marriage and the live bride swearing that she will live her marriage in the corpse's memory, part of the Jewish tradition of honoring the dead through the lives and good works of the living.
A similar motif has also been used by Prosper Mérimée in his story La Vénus d'Ille. Instead of the corpse bride, the ancient statue of Venus figures in the story.
A recurring image through the movie is that of a blue butterfly, ranging from a drawing Victor makes at the beginning, using a live model, to the Corpse Bride herself dissolving into mass of butterflies. This resonates with a European folktale that a brutally murdered woman would be reborn as a butterfly."
Rating: 64