A manual labor of love

EVERY bride-to-be needs someone to turn to for sage counsel as the big day nears.

But only in “Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride” could that traditional movie role be played by a maggot that lives in one of the bride’s eyes. And only in stop-motion animation could the slimy creature be portrayed by a handmade puppet whose innards are actually filled with Swiss-watch-quality gears.

“He’s inspired by Peter Lorre -- an homage to the old horror films,” explained co-director Mike Johnson as he inspected the puppet vault at 3 Mills Studio, in an industrial section of East London, where the movie was crafted. “He’s kind of a twisted Jiminy Cricket-type voice of wisdom -- when she’s troubled, he pops out of her eye socket and offers some advice.”

Today’s movie audiences are more sophisticated than ever, and accustomed to action-packed films that follow explosion with explosion, but Burton still believes that fans can be lured by a story told at a stately pace using old-fashioned animation techniques developed decades ago.

It is a gamble costing nearly $40 million, but one with a built-in safety net -- the legion of Burton-philes who adored “The Nightmare Before Christmas,” his last stop-motion feature, which earned more than $50 million after its 1993 release and is still going strong on DVD. With its cult following, “Nightmare” remains a merchandising bonanza: A video game is being readied for fall release.

Warner Bros.’ “Corpse Bride,” which opens Friday in Los Angeles, represented a huge time commitment for Burton and his inner circle, who were also busy readying the summer hit “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.” Production took roughly three years because stop-motion animation is so challenging -- each of the puppets must be carefully moved between frames, a process that taxes the stamina and goodwill of everyone involved.

Like most Tim Burton stories, “Corpse Bride” is a familiar tale with a macabre twist. It’s a traditional love triangle, except that one of the protagonists happens to be dead, which proves a considerable inconvenience. Johnny Depp provides the voice for Victor, the timid protagonist whose puppet bears a strong resemblance to Depp, and Helena Bonham Carter, Burton’s wife, plays the passionate, love-starved corpse bride.

Much of the visual and thematic power stems from the contrast between the drab, Victorian-era Land of the Living and the more colorful Land of the Dead, with Depp’s character caught somewhere in between.

“We are sort of doing a reversal, making the Land of the Living seem much more dead, more muted, a humorless society,” said Burton. “And the Land of the Dead is more upbeat and more emotional. It stems from growing up feeling slightly repressed, in a suburban kind of way, with not much emotion shown, and looking at the Day of the Dead in Mexico, where they treat death as part of life instead of treating it as bland and dark. I just preferred other cultures, where they treat it as a celebration of life, not a negative.”

Burton had wanted to make a stop-motion follow-up to “Nightmare Before Christmas” for more than a decade but waited for a story that was the right fit with the unusual technique, which has been eclipsed in the eyes of most filmmakers by computer-generated animation.

“I just grew up loving the handmade quality and beauty of stop-motion,” he said. “It reminds you that movies are an art form, not a business. It feels like a lost art form, with the beauty of the puppets.”

Despite the detailed work required, Burton’s crew knows that stop-motion has usually been sniffed at by animation connoisseurs, who prefer the more traditional methods pioneered by Disney or cutting-edge computerized imagery.

“I think computer-generated animation can make really appealing, great movies, but people get so locked in they say other types of animation are dead, and that is upsetting to me,” Burton said.

The industry consensus that stop-motion’s days are numbered is probably a result of the way the technique was used in its early days, primarily for horror films, said Pete Kozachik, the director of photography on both “Corpse Bride” and “Nightmare Before Christmas.”

He said the best-known example of stop-motion is probably the classic “King Kong” sequences, which were pathbreaking at the time.

Kozachik said many older viewers find stop-motion films too strange to enjoy, but that the younger generation raised on MTV is more visually astute and able to judge a stop-motion film as a story that rises or falls on its own merits.

“The process has always been a niche and has not always been well-respected,” he said. “It used to be used as the only tool to make giant monsters in horror films. It’s got a certain look that is less than perfectly real. There is a weird, surreal, expressionistic quality about it.”

The filmmakers believe they have a secret weapon in this regard: the corpse bride herself. Her charisma and sexiness carry the show, Kozachik said.

“She is an enigma for most of the film,” he said. “She starts out as kind of a ditz, and at some point she has an epiphany. I think most red-blooded men are going to find her just fine, even if she is dead.”

THE METHOD, THE MADNESS

BURTON has toyed with the idea of constantly keeping a stop-motion feature in production but concluded that it only makes sense to use the technique when there is a perfect match between the story and the antiquated technique.

“I don’t know why, but these animated films feel very personal,” he said. “It’s easier for me to feel stronger about than a live-action film. Part of the joy of doing it is remembering why you like to make films.”

Burton’s commitment to the project is obvious, but the reality is that the director had been busy on “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” and left much of the day-to-day supervision to co-director Johnson, a “Nightmare Before Christmas” veteran blessed with the patience needed to work with teams of animators month after month.

“We’re trying to get the best of both worlds,” said Johnson. “We’re hoping that it holds up as a dramatic story to the level that a live-action Victorian period piece would, and we want the fun and gags and visual things that go with stop-motion. It’s a balancing act. Hopefully it works on both levels.”

Johnson admits that the stop-motion animation system is “archaic” in an age when viewers are accustomed to super-smooth computer-generated effects, but he remains a devotee.

He said the planned release of “Corpse Bride” this fall, and the release of an Aardman Animations stop-motion film, represent something of a revival in the field. It has been about five years since the last stop-motion feature, DreamWorks’ “Chicken Run.”

“You have to be crazy to do this,” he said. “There are probably between 50 and 100 people in the world who actually make a living doing stop-motion. There aren’t many opportunities to do it at this level, so people really come running.”

The process is improving because of high-tech materials, he said, citing the way the new generation of silicon skin reacts to light much as human skin does, giving the art director many more possibilities.

A THREE-YEAR COMMITMENT

JOHNSON credits Burton for coming up with the film’s concept and look and says his job is to realize Burton’s vision. “He oversees the shots and the storyboards and has final say on everything,” says Johnson.

The tall, tapered puppets have a distinct Burton look, but many require special rigging because their feet and ankles are too small to support their body weight. Shooting on the puppet-sized stages has been incredibly slow, averaging just two minutes of film per week.

That means a long-term commitment is needed -- three years’ worth of soggy sandwiches from the nearby supermarket that is the only lunch option in the drab section of East London where the studio is located.

“The thing that makes it the hardest is you are using real sets, real lights, real fabrics, and some of these puppets couldn’t even sit down unless you designed them to do it, so we really had to know what each character was going to do before the puppet was designed,” said producer Allison Abbate, another “Nightmare” alum. “The magic is that the puppets are really doing all those things you see them do.”

Her task is complicated by the large number of sets and scenes that have to be successfully coordinated if the production pace is to be maintained. The goal all along was to release the film late in September 2005 to capitalize on the upcoming Halloween season.

“We have 35 sets and 25 animators, and every set is like its own little movie,” she said. “The director has to be in 35 places at once.”

The English-made puppets are remarkable. The lead puppets cost about $30,000 each to produce, and a full-time maintenance team is on set to keep them in action. Each miniature head has translucent silicon skin and gears hidden inside so that smiles, smirks and other facial expressions can be produced.

The baseball-size heads, the smallest ever made for this purpose, are extremely delicate and precise. The merest unwanted move can destroy a scene’s continuity, giving the animators fits and throwing off the crucial Halloween timetable.

That leads to skills not normally needed on a movie set. Shannon O’Neill, for example, is trained as a jeweler, but she spent her time working on the puppets’ facial mechanics. By putting a tiny Allen wrench into the Corpse Bride’s ear, for example, O’Neill can turn a gear and get the main character to smile or open her mouth to speak, and can even manipulate her eyebrows.

“I never needed glasses until I worked on these,” she said, gingerly adjusting the bride’s eyebrows, which are mounted on tiny ball-and-socket joints.

Another example of the painstaking work required is a wedding cake from the Land of the Dead that is decorated with 50 skulls and some bones. It took four craftsmen about seven days to make the prop, which has to be rigged internally so that it can seem to move naturally when it is carried by a crew of skeletons.

All anticipated motions have to be planned for ahead of time. The cake had to be constructed in a way that these motions could be carried out without destroying it.

It is a considerable expenditure of time and money for an item that will only be on screen for about eight seconds.