The trailer for Corpse Bride is now up at Apple. Before you ask, I don’t know if this is a teaser or the final trailer. It does a good job setting up what the movie is about, so I’m not sure they’ll need to cut a longer version.
Corpse Bride is the second animated movie I’ve worked on, the first being Titan A.E.. Unlike Titan, which was a combination of traditional and computer animation, Corpse Bride was done with stop-motion animation like Tim Burton’s earlier The Nightmare Before Christmas. The artistry behind the animation is painstaking — each frame you shoot is pretty much the way it’s going to be in the final film.
From a writer’s perspective, there’s not a lot of difference between writing for animation and writing a normal live-action movie. Where you feel the difference is in production and post. In “normal” movies, it’s not too hard to re-arrange a scene, or change a line of dialogue in editing. With this technique, there’s less wiggle room. Once the shutter clicks, you’re pretty much locked. In some ways, that’s liberating. It means there’s a lot more attention to the details from the outset.
The movie comes out at Halloween in the States. (I’m not sure about the rest of the world.)