This movie is everything that a feature length cartoon should be and more. The graphics are inventive, the story is wistful and charming, and the characterizations by the actors are all "dead on" (pun intended!).

As a special Halloween treat, this movie wonderfully fills the bill!

The musical score by Danny Elfman is just superb. It is so good, in fact, that this cartoon, which has numerous short songs sung by the actors, could actually qualify as a musical. I can't say that all of the songs are memorable, nor can I say that the lead actors have a promising future as singers, but no matter, it is all great fun.

It is a movie for kids of all ages with its story about an old fashioned romance that takes place in the Merry Olde England of the Nineteenth Century with the down at their heels aristocratic Everglot family unhappily forced to marry off their daughter, Victoria (voice of Emily Watson), to Victor Van Dort (voice of Johnny Depp), the son of - Horrors! - a nouveaux riche fish merchant.

Both Victor and Victoria are shy and naive and deeply troubled by their impending nuptials. However, both are willing to go through with the marriage as neither is willing to question the authority of their parents. They only first meet just before the wedding rehearsal and it is a case of love at first sight. They then proceed to the rehearsal newly filled with joy and expectations for a happy marriage.

Rich Lord Barkis Bittern (voice of Richard E. Grant) hovers in the background with a smarmy, condescending attitude hoping to intercede and grab pretty Victoria for himself. His moment soon comes when Victor makes such a hash of the rehearsal ceremony that he alienates both the officiating priest and his future in-laws. He also deeply embarrasses his own parents, who have long since assumed airs of propriety and are less than impressed with their shy, studious, dreamer of a son.

Victor flees to the dark forest just outside town filled with doubts about himself but clear in the fact that he has fallen in love with Victoria. In a fanciful but regrettable moment of play acting, he ends up proposing and placing his ring on a hand-like branch that to his shock and consternation turns out to have a corpse (voice of Helena Bonham Carter) attached to it.

Like most stories, this villainess is a spunky but sweet soul who has as much or more personality than Victor's fiancée. She quickly accepts his "proposal" and brings the befuddled lad below ground to introduce him to her friends in an underworld filled with a host of colorful characters much like the rum runners in Disney World's Pirates of the Caribbean ride.

She is a lost soul who was cruelly murdered on the night before her wedding by a brute who stripped her lifeless body of her jewels and then ran off with her dowry. She has been pining for him ever since, but now that Victor is hers she can finally be happy.

But there are rules that must even be obeyed beyond the pale. The question of "Can the living marry the dead?" quickly becomes of paramount importance and the Corpse Bride is forced to search high and low for a way to make her marriage to Victor legitimate in both her world and above.

"Corpse Bride" is not nearly as ambitious as Burton's "Sleepy Hollow," which is a much darker tale of horror whereas this is more of a fairy tale with its few touches of horror colored with sweetness and light. The two movies really shouldn't be compared even though they are both, each in its own way, perfect feature length cartoons for Halloween.