Toronto Film Festival: Tim Burton mounts his "Corpse Bride, while honeymooning with "Charlie"

Tim Burton looks at the world through blue glasses, and you don't.

Everything about the director's carefully calculated other-worldliness - including the bird's nest hairdo, the slightly goonie affect that must have made him wildly popular to beat up in high school, and the gigantic blue-on-black hornrims that make a spectacle of him - reminds you that this is the strange genius behind such weirdo wonderments as "Beetlejuice", "Edward Scissorhands", "Ed Wood", the summer hit "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory", and now one of the early successes of the Toronto Film Festival, "Corpse Bride".

Burton's "Bride" - that's the happy couple, above, moments after the groom was fitted for his wedding night codpiece, judging by the look on his face - arrives south of the (Canadian) border on Sept. 23. It figures to be his second monster hit in just two months. "Charlie" has already piled up $350 million in worldwide grosses, and "Corpse Bride" could give Burton a half-billion dollar year.

On top of all that, he's hooked up with Merchant-Ivory's longtime corset queen, totally righteous Victorian vixen Helena Bonham Carter, who performs the voice of the Corpse Bride. As luck would have it, she also is the voice of the leading lady in the other stop-animated movie here, "Wallace & Gromit - The Curse of the Were-Rabbit".

One of the things Burton loves about stop-motion animation is the fact that the technology has advanced remarkably little since he made "The Nightmare Before Christmas" in 1993. "There’s something very primal about the medium, something very textural and dimensional about it", Burton says. "It’s different from a computer that way. It’s such an old-fashioned technique that, with this story, the medium and the story seemed to match."

Burton grew up watching the stop-motion classics of Ray Harryhausen. But with computer animation now firmly entrenched in Hollywood because of such Pixar hits as "Toy Story" and "Finding Nemo," using clay figures and puppets - as the "Wallace & Gromit" films from England's Ardman Studio do, and as Burton does - to enact full-length movies seems willfully archaic.

Stop-motion animation is probably the most labor-intensive form of filmmaking ever invented. The figures are set in position, photographed, then moved a fraction of an inch, shot again, and the process is repeated again and again until, at the end of a week, a minute or so of footage has been produced.

"The process is such a long, slow-motion one, it wouldn’t have done much good for me to be sitting there, torturing the animation artists while they’re trying to do their work," Burton says.

The day-to-day work was directed by Mike Johnson, who is nowhere to be found now that bows are being taken in Toronto. "Since I’ve had the luxury of making movies, it was easier for me to have the overview of it in terms of what shots we needed, all that sort of thing. Mike has done stop-motion, so he gets it, he gets the process. And that was important, to have him there with the other animators."

"Corpse Bride" continues Burton's long-running collaborations with composer Danny Elfman and star Johnny Depp, who does the voice of bridegroom Victor Van Dort. Depp played Willy Wonka in "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory," as well as the two Eds - Wood and Scissorhands - and starred in an eerily similar-looking "Sleepy Hollow." Burton insists the two men still challenge each other, which doesn't make working together any picnic.

!He's a friend, and an amazing actor, but I don't think either of us consider it easy," the director says. "We both like to maintain a certain, um, energy. One of the reasons I like to work with him is he transforms himself into the character each time, and that keeps it fresh and exciting."

If you didn't know better, you'd swear Burton was looking at the world through rose-colored glasses.

"I think computer animation is very valid," Burton continues. "But in Hollywood, they think drawn animation doesn’t work anymore, computers are the way. They forget that the reason computers are the way is that Pixar makes good movies. So everybody tries to copy Pixar. They’re relying too much on the technology and not enough on the artists. The fact that Disney closed down its cel animation division is frightening to me. Someday soon, somebody will come along and do a drawn-animated film, and it’ll be beautiful and connect with people, and they’ll all go, 'Oh, we’ve got to do that!' It’s ridiculous."