Corpse Bride Analysis

Corpse Bride

I chose to see the Corpse Bride an animated film by Tim Burton. I picked this film because I thought it would have used an extensive soundscape. There was so much going on that I was paying so much attention to the audio that I missed a lot of the beautiful details in the animation. The movie was somewhat of a musical with about five songs that were composed by Danny Elfman. Usually I wouldn’t sit through a quasi musical but since it was an animation it just seemed to fit. The songs were very tasteful in the respect that they didn’t go overboard into the musical theatre category of just ridiculous. Danny Elfman just had a way of keeping you on the edge of your seat with his brilliant compositions. One of the songs had a cool ragtime feel to it with a vocal that could be compared to the style of Tom Waits. Needless to say I really enjoyed the music.

I saw the film in the middle of the afternoon so there was no one in the theater with me. This allowed me to make a little noise. I produced a series of loud claps that disappeared just as fast as they came. Needless to say the theater was very dry which in turn let the soundtrack work to its fullest potential. I did get a little annoyed at some random noises that were not part of the movie such as the projectionist fumbling around in the booth. Also during a quiet part in the movie I heard what appeared to be thunder coming from the theater next me. Other than that the room seemed to be pretty isolated.

At first I didn’t know if the film was mixed in 5.1 or 7.1. There seemed to be a drastic left and right channel spread that was used for certain dialogue but mostly sound effects such as the sweep of a broom from left to right or for the massive reverb of the cathedral. This was my first clue that the film was mixed in 7.1 due to the wide stereo imaging. There were also left extra and right extra loudspeakers that were used to reproduce the dialogue of characters that were left or right of the center of the screen. Obviously the mono channel was used for characters that were in the center of the screen. I noticed that the spacing of the dialogue changed when the camera angle changed giving me the felling like I was walking around the room amongst the characters. The left surround and right