The ghoul can't help it

They are just like buses. You wait for ever and then two come along at once. First we had Nick Park's The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, and now Tim Burton's Corpse Bride. Both are stop-motion epics showing that the cinema may have progressed using CGI, but that painstaking traditional animation still rules, OK.

Park's film was totally English in tone and all the better for it. But it wouldn't be true to say that Burton's is typically American. Based on a Russian folk tale, there are European influences aplenty, even if Charles Addams (The Munsters) and Max Fleischer (Betty Boop/Popeye) are obvious precursors, too.

In it, Victor (voiced by Johnny Depp), meets his arranged bride Victoria (Emily Watson) at the wedding rehearsal, nervously bungles the ceremony and, practising in the woods at night, accidentally slips the ring on the skeletal Emily (Helena Bonham Carter), the corpse bride who takes him down to a surprisingly lively land of the dead.

Poor Emily, robbed and murdered by her wicked fiancé, is a nice kid. But Victor has fallen for Victoria and so the ructions begin. The cast of subsidiary characters includes a morbidly tyrannical clergyman (Christopher

Lee's is the one voice you instantly recognise), Victor's nastily nouveau-riche parents (Tracey Ullman and Paul Whitehouse), Victoria's poverty-stricken aristo mum and dad (Joanna Lumley and Albert Finney), and the money-grubbing swine who wants Victoria's hand (Richard E Grant).

Star names are all very well, but Corpse Bride stands or falls by its visuals, and these are unmistakably Burton's. They aren't exactly Gothic and this isn't by any means a horrorfest. It is, in fact, an inventive comedy which seems to say that the living are often greater freaks than the ghoulish dead.

There are sight gags by the dozen, including a maggot that lives in the heroine's skull and pops out of her eye sockets, and a severed head carried around by beetles, which poses as a head waiter.

The tone is frantically busy and graveyard-lite, with the stop-motion allowing far more expressive faces than CGI can generally manage. Don't worry about nightmares. This is nowhere near Elm Street. It's just an exceedingly imaginative director having childlike fun.

Tim Burton's Corpse Bride
Cert: PG