Your Email:

Friend's Email:

Note: (optional)

Subject:

Message: <br /><br /> If you are having trouble reading this email, you may view this article online at: http://www.jweekly.com/27073/full/27073/tim-burton-s-corpse-bride-has-jewish-bones/ <br /><br /> <b>Tim Burton’s ‘Corpse Bride’ has Jewish bones</b> <br /> Friday, September 16, 2005 | by <p>naomi pfefferman </p> <br /><br /><p>Once upon a time, a bridegroom jokingly recited his marriage vows over a skeletal finger protruding from the earth. After placing his ring on the bone, his mirth turned to horror when a grasping hand burst forth, followed by a corpse in a tattered shroud, her dead eyes staring as she proclaimed, “My husband.”<br /><br /> This chilling Jewish folk tale hails from a cycle of stories about the great 16th-century mystic, Rabbi Isaac Luria of Safed, in what is now northern Israel, said Howard Schwartz, a top Jewish folklorist and professor at the University of Missouri-St. Louis.<br /><br /> It also apparently inspired Tim Burton’s charmingly ghoulish animated film, “Corpse Bride.” Yes, the film features a bridegroom who accidentally weds a cadaver. But the feature eschews the folk tale’s grotesquerie for romanticized gloom and Halloweeny fun — a trademark of Burton fare such as “Edward Scissorhands” and “The Nightmare Before Christmas.” <br /><br /> “Corpse Bride” is among more than a dozen fantasy films slated to open this year, including Peter Jackson’s “King Kong,” which some analysts attribute to the yen for escapist cinema during wartime.<br /><br /> “Bride” revolves around a shy, bumbling groom, Victor (voiced by Johnny Depp), who is practicing the wedding ceremony when he impulsively slides his ring on what he assumes is a stick. The corpse who emerges (voiced by Burton’s real-life fiancée, Helena Bonham Carter) is not a hideously disintegrating cadaver, but a lovely, if unearthly heroine.<br /><br /> “When she gently takes off her veil and we see her for the first time, it becomes a glamour-girl shot,” cinematographer Pete Kozachik said.<br /><br /> The cadaver claims her husband, but does not emit bloodcurdling shrieks or insist upon the consummation of the marriage, like her folk-tale counterpart. Her mild flaws include a tendency toward petulance and an understandable proclivity for dropping a limb or having her eyeball pop out. On these occasions, a maggot pal pops out of her exposed eye socket.<br /><br /> This damsel-past-distress whisks Victor off to the Land of the Dead, a lively place where skeletons party, forcing Victor to leave his living fiancée (voiced by Emily Watson) bereft.<br /><br /> So why did Burton, who is known to dress like a mortician, brighten the Jewish tale?<br /><br /> “We wanted to make a version that wasn’t so disturbing that you couldn’t put it in a family movie,” said co-screenwriter John August, who also wrote Burton’s “Big Fish” and “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.”<br /><br /> The characters are non-Jewish, he added, “because Tim gravitates toward universal, fairy-tale qualities in his films.”<br /><br /> Burton got the idea for the movie when his late executive producer, Joe Ranft, brought him excerpts from the 16th-century legend.<br /><br /> Jewish folklorist Schwartz, author of “Tree of Souls: The Mythology of Judaism” (Oxford University Press, 2004), retells the corpse tale in his 1987 book “Lilith’s Cave: Jewish Tales of the Supernatural,” in a story titled “The Finger.” His source was the 17th-century volume, “Shivhei ha-Ari,” which collected earlier stories about the alleged feats of the real Rabbi Luria. <br /><br /> In the corpse-bride narrative, Luria confronts the cadaver, who accepts his authority. He is a member of the rabbinic court that eventually rules against the corpse, stating that she is not married because the dead have no claim upon the living, among other reasons.<br /><br /> The real Luria lived in the 16th century, but the origin of tales about nuptials with supernatural entities is far earlier. <br /><br /> In “The Finger,” the wayward bridegroom gets lucky. After the rabbis rule against the validity of the corpse’s marriage to the careless suitor, the would-be bride — after emitting one last shriek — collapses in a pile of bones and dies, this time for keeps.<br /><br /> <br /><br /><br /> <b>“Corpse Bride”</b> opens Friday, Sept. 16, in Bay Area theaters.</p> <p> </p>

Please enter the letters and numbers you see in the image below: