While watching Corpse Bride and delighting in the puppets and their look, the sets and the design, the colour and movement, we are not surprised to know that Tim Burton is an artist as well as a director.

This has been evident in the design of his fantasies like Beetlejuice, his Batman films, Edward Scissorhands, Sleepy Hollow – and with more touches of brightness in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. It was also evident in the animated film he produced, The Nightmare Before Christmas. Burton is an idiosyncratic but skilful and imaginative film-maker.

Corpse Bride is very entertaining, more of an adult fantasy than one for children. It is based on an Eastern European folktale. However, it is set in a rather grimy late Victorian England where the impoverished upper class are desperate to marry off their daughter into wealth and the nouveau (and vulgar) riche are ambitious to be seen in society, even if they are fishmongers. This is all the more forceful when the parents are voiced by Albert Finney and Joanna Lumley (snobs) and Tracy Ullman and Paul Whitehouse (would-be snobs).

Poor young Victor Van Dort is a forlorn, accident-prone young man who is being set up to marry, sight unseen, Victoria Everglot. If ever true love had its difficulties, it is here between Victor and Victoria. What is worse, when he tries to rehearse his marriage vows (after being intimidated by a fearsome clergyman voiced even more fearsomely by Christopher Lee), he is overheard by a ghost, Emily, the corpse bride who has been done to death longs since by a dastardly villain (voiced by a dastardly Richard E. Grant). The scene then moves to the underworld, the haven of ghosts, which is much brighter and more colourful than life above ground.

So, a dilemma. Should Victor marry Emily who has an emotional as well as a skeletal hold on him, or should be tell her the truth and return to Emily. He is an honourable young man and tries to do the right thing – and, despite the darkness of the plot, there is a happy ending for Victor, Victoria and Emily.

Not only is this a delightful fable about honesty and true love, it is a very witty take on social mores of the nineteenth century. What consolidates the visuals is the quality of the character voices. Emily Watson is a nice and plaintiff Victoria. Helena Bonham Carter is a feisty Victoria. But, Johnny Depp (with yet another convincing British accent) brings the visual Victor truly alive as a decent young man caught in a parents’ ambitions and a corpse bride’s trap.

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