Romeo and Victor have a similar dilemma: dead brides. Romeo ends up with one, which is bad enough. But Victor starts out with one, which -- as dilemmas go -- seems rather worse.

	Victor Van Dort, voiced by Johnny Depp, is wooed by the "Corpse Bride," voiced by Helena Bonham Carter. Click photo for larger image. "Corpse Bride" Rating: PG-13 for frightening images. Voices: Johnny Depp, Helena Bonham Carter, Emily Watson. Directors: Mike Johnson and Tim Burton. "Corpse Bride" Web site Post-Gazette Family Film Guide review of "Corpse Bride"

It's certainly a more ongoing issue for the groom in Tim Burton's "Corpse Bride" than for the one in Will Shakespeare's "Romeo & Juliet." There was no way to reanimate Miss Capulet. Vic's dead fiancee is animated the minute he lays eyes -- and, accidentally, a wedding ring -- on her in the macabre but dazzling Claymation-type feature at hand.

At the outset, shy Victor (voiced by Johnny Depp) is betrothed to equally shy Victoria (Emily Watson) in -- where else? -- Victorian England. It's a marriage of nouveau-and-old-riche convenience arranged by their conniving parents. But this Victor/Victoria team will be crossing the bar instead of cross-dressing: That ring mistake magically resurrects a murdered Corpse Bride (Helena Bonham Carter), who claims Victor for herself and drags him below into the Night and Day of the Cartoon Dead.

It's a happnin' place downstairs. These underworld bars are alive with dead customers and honky-tonk skeleton bands that break into well-choreographed song-and-dance routines in celebration of their beloved C-Bride's impending nuptials.

But Victor has trouble adjusting to her state of decay: Ask for this girl's hand, and you literally get it. Her eyeball has a habit of falling out of its socket, providing a convenient entrance and exit for a wisecracking worm with a Peter Lorre voice. Jiminy Cricket was unavailable. Corpse Bride's buggy-sidekick is Jiminy Maggot.

Upstairs, meanwhile, mournful Victoria is claimed by slimy Barkis Bittern, who looks like a cross between President James Buchanan and Jay Leno, and who seizes his chance to replace AWOL Victor at the altar.

"Corpse Bride," long in the making, is derived from a Russian folk tale. You know those wild, wacky Russians ("Dead Souls," "Lower Depths," "Notes from Underground"). They're fascinated by those after-death nightmares and grotesque characters -- and so is Burton ("Edward Scissorhands," "Beetlejuice," "Ed Wood," "Pee-wee's Big Adventure," "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory").

Helena Bonham Carter gives voice to the "Corpse Bride." Click photo for larger image.

Burton is equally fascinated by Depp, the star of many of his films, but I'm not sure the Depp voice -- or those of the luminary Carter, Watson, Tracey Ullman, Albert Finney, Christopher Lee, etc. -- were all that necessary here.

The picture's appeal comes not from them but from the painstaking frame-by-frame stop-motion animation (used by Burton in "The Nightmare Before Christmas"), which consists of moving big-eyed puppets in tiny increments, a frame at a time. (It takes a 12-hour work day to come away with a few seconds on film.) Compared with state-of-the-art high-tech animatronics, it's an anachronistic -- but charming -- process.

Burton's funny supporting-role caricatures, with their toothpick legs and Marge Simpson hairdos, lend themselves to it: Mad Hatter priests and parents, deceased French caterers, toe-tappin' skeletal Rockettes, six-eyed black widow spiders, and a town crier who mutters, "In other news ...," after screaming out the lead story.

Two big problems: First, the dubious musical concept -- Gilbert & Sullivan meets "Little Shop of Horrors" -- with its pitfalls. The funny songs are good; the "serious" ones are awful. The second, and larger, hitch is the sappy formulaic resolution of such un-formulaic material.

"Corpse" ends up being not politically but necrophilically correct, as if the dead are the newest minority group of whom our consciousness should be raised. But, hey, they're really the majority. Think of how many dead vs. live homo sapiens there are. This marriage is the ultimate miscegenation. Ghoulish or foolish? Burton's weird movie is both -- but oh, so visually and unusually beautiful.