“Corpse Bride,” which Burton co-directed with Mike Johnson, begins with a wedding gone wrong. Canned-fish magnates Nell and William Van Dort (their voices belong to Tracey Ullman and Paul Whitehouse) have money but no class; and Maudeline and Finis Everglot (Joanna Lumley and Albert Finney) have aristocratic roots but no dough. The families decide to merge by arranging a marriage between their respective children, Victor (Johnny Depp) and Victoria (Emily Watson), who, as of the night before the wedding, have never even met. They fall in love, of course, at first sight. But by a curious turn of events, Victor accidentally stumbles into the world of Emily, the Corpse Bride (Helena Bonham Carter), who was killed by her intended on her wedding day. Her heart, she notes, is capable of being broken even though it has stopped beating. And she desperately wants Victor to be her husband, even though he’s betrothed to someone else.

So Emily conveys Victor to the Land of the Dead, an underground world rendered in vivid jellybean colors, a far cry from the muted gray Victorian reality Victor knows. But that world is home to Victor, and he aches to get back to it. “Corpse Bride” was written by John August, Caroline Thompson and Pamela Pettler, and as a piece of storytelling, it holds up admirably against any live-action script. The story is beautifully worked out, and it gets most of its momentum from the feelings of the characters. There’s Victor, charming but hapless at first, whose strengths are ultimately magnified by his compassion for a person in pain; the steady and true Victoria, left to believe that Victor has willingly abandoned her for someone else; and, most affecting of all, the fragile but vital Emily, who sees Victor as her last chance at happiness — the only other option for her is to face the rest of eternity alone.

The world of “Corpse Bride” is so vivid that it’s hard to believe these are puppets we’re talking about. Victor, with his saucer eyes and brilliantined forelock, looks more like the human Johnny Depp than Depp himself did in “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.” And Emily, perched on matchstick ballerina legs (on one of them, her flesh has rotted away and you can see an exposed flash of bone, a disconcertingly erotic visual), is a specter of tragic love wrapped in tattered wedding clothes. Her nose is a pert inverted “V”; her lips have a sensual pout that suggests not even death can fully destroy the human sex drive.

Emily’s world is populated by singing, dancing skeletons (they perform several songs composed by longtime Burton collaborator Danny Elfman, including a rousing Gilbert and Sullivan-style ensemble number); by beings who used to be soldiers or waiters or bakers in life and just can’t break the habit even now that they’re dead (some of these skills come in handy when it’s time to make the couple’s wedding cake, a towering creation festooned with fondant skulls and femurs); and by tiny, mischievous skeleton kiddies (they tiptoe through the movie, giggling, in their little Victorian frocks and sailor outfits). There’s an ick-green talking maggot who takes after Peter Lorre (his voice actually belongs to Enn Reitel) and a dog named Scraps, Victor’s beloved, deceased childhood pet — Emily presents him to Victor as a wedding present. He’s now a butt-wriggling assemblage of bones, but his essential spirit of doggyness is undiminished.

It’s a tossup as to what’s more appealing, the rainbow-hued Land of the Dead, beneath the Earth’s surface, or the grayish Land of the Living up above. There’s definitely more fun going on down below, with lots of live dead entertainment and an eternally open bar. (As a wise old dead elder, voiced by Michael Gough, observes, “Why go up there when people are dying to get down here?”)

But the colors in the Land of the Living are more subtly beautiful: There are endless variations of grays, and Burton (along with his clearly hardworking technical team) uses the whole palette, tinting this allegedly boring color with pinks and blues and violets. The delicacy of these creamy tones suits the passionate but tender nature of the story, and their earthbound beauty fits the movie’s realistically romantic theme: Love isn’t ownership, and it’s no good unless it’s freely given. “Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride” is a lush, modern valentine to old-fashioned sentiment, and to old-fashioned moviemaking, too. When Victor sits down at a grand piano, we see that it features a brass plate inscribed with “Harryhausen” in majestic letters, a tribute to special-effects genius Ray Harryhausen, whose work is so lovingly referenced here. Harryhausen is now 85, and although today’s kids may not know who he is, many of yesterday’s kids do, from Saturday-afternoon movie staples like “Jason and the Argonauts” and “The Golden Voyage of Sinbad.” With “Corpse Bride,” Burton and Johnson pay tribute to the people, and the techniques, that have inspired them. Their movie is a living love letter, not a memento mori.

“Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” is absinthe in movie form, a white chocolate space egg of a picture that has a giddy hallucinatory quality in some places and an overcalculated glossiness in others. But for better or worse, it’s fascinating. Burton’s movie may be truer to the mischievously misanthropic spirit of Roald Dahl’s 1964 novel than the 1971 Mel Stuart musical “Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory” was: Burton picks up on the weird, sadistic streak of Willy Wonka, the reclusive, eccentric owner of a giant candy factory who barely even bothers to pretend to like children. In some ways Burton and Depp take the sadism, and the weirdness, too far, but at least you can’t accuse them of trying to file down Dahl’s magnificently pointy teeth. The screenplay, by John August (who also wrote the script for Burton’s last picture, the treacle-glazed “Big Fish,” adapted from Daniel Wallace’s novel), has snap and bite and a certain degree of warped loopiness (as when Depp’s glassy-eyed Wonka greets his public with a crisply enunciated, “Good morning, starshine — the earth says hello!”). The dialogue is reasonably faithful to the source material, at least in its tone, and Danny Elfman has written a handful of mildly catchy songs using Dahl’s original lyrics, which have to do chiefly with the diabolical pleasures of squeezing spoiled fat kids through giant tubes and turning gum-chewing brats into huge, floating blueberries.

And yet, even with all those good intentions — and so many liberal dashes of inspired lunacy — “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” doesn’t hang together as well as it should. The movie’s opening scenes are in many ways the most engaging: That’s when we meet young Charlie Bucket (Freddie Highmore, of “Finding Neverland,” in a performance that’s suitably earnest without ever lurching into cuteness), who lives in a small, rickety gray house with his mother and father (Helena Bonham Carter and Noah Taylor) and his four elderly grandparents, who spend nearly all of their time in bed. There’s never enough to eat in the Bucket household — the family subsists on nothing but cabbage soup, which is all Mr. Bucket, who works in a toothpaste factory screwing caps on tubes, can afford. But this is a home where everyone genuinely cares for one another, and young Charlie is particularly close to his Grandpa Joe (the wonderful Irish actor David Kelly), who regales young Charlie with stories of his days long ago as an employee of Willy Wonka, the owner of the most marvelous candy factory in the world, which happens to be located right near the Buckets’ house.

But Wonka is a strange guy: Years ago, he was bitterly disappointed by employees who sold his secrets, and so he has closed his factory to the public — no civilian has been inside it for years. Wonka has announced, though, that he will give away five golden tickets, wrapped randomly in his signature chocolate bars. The recipients of these tickets will be given a tour of the factory and are also eligible for a special prize.

Charlie, who gets only one candy bar a year, for his birthday, has little hope of finding a ticket. But sure enough, through an almost magical turn of events, he gets one. And so this kind, unspoiled, well-mannered child arrives for his day at the factory with the other winners and their parents; his Grandpa Joe accompanies him.

The other kids, as anyone who has read Dahl’s books or has seen the earlier movie knows, are hateful brats whose indulgent parents haven’t done them any favors, and they meet nasty (although not deadly) fates at Wonka’s hands. Wonka, as Depp plays him, is hardly the kind of guy you’d entrust your kids’ welfare to: A potential sociopath in a velvet coat and bright purple latex gloves, he speaks in a sugary, clipped, robotic singsong; his skin has a greenish-gray cast; and his eyes, beneath his Prince Valiant haircut, twinkle with demonic blankness.

Depp’s Wonka is scary as heck, but not necessarily because he seems like a child molester. Some critics and smartypants onlookers have noted that the character bears a creepy and unfortunate resemblance to Michael Jackson, but to me, he’s much more like Phil Spector, a wacko soft-spoken prince who spends his days pacing his prisonlike palace. Depp’s performance isn’t bad; it’s just so carefully pruned, like a sharply tailored topiary bush, that it feels more like character design than a performance. When he fixes his glazed stare on the little tykes he’s squiring around his vast, psychedelic-colored factory and observes, “You’re all quite short, aren’t you?” it’s enough to coax a shuddering laugh out of you. But past a certain point, the performance feels like shtick, a tired riff on one uncomplicated idea. We don’t necessarily have to like Willy Wonka, but should just looking at him give us a headache?

Burton has fleshed out Dahl’s story to some degree, giving us more information about Wonka’s background than we perhaps care to know (he has some daddy issues, and you would, too, if your father was a dentist played by the marvelously authoritarian Christopher Lee). And while the candy factory is something of a visual marvel — including a landscape of mushroomy-looking gumdrop trees and a shiny fuchsia Viking ship with a curvy seahorse at the prow — the opening and closing sections of “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” are the ones that work best. In other words, the scenes that take place in the impoverished Bucket household are more effective, emotionally, than anything else in the movie. With a few notable exceptions (“Pee Wee’s Big Adventure” among them), Burton is better with the infinitely variegated palette of grays than he is with candy colors — bright colors don’t seem to fire his imagination as much as dark ones do.

But maybe the myriad flaws of “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” are simply the downside of genius. There are sequences in “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” that are as nutcase-dazzling as anything Burton has ever attempted. Burton tells the back story of how Wonka recruited the Oompa Loompa tribe, from Oompa Loompa land, to work in his factory. (The Oompa Loompas are all played by one actor, the marvelously expressive Deep Roy.) In a sequence straight out of a Bob Hope/Bring Crosby “Road” movie — with all the now-forbidden political incorrectness that implies — Burton shows us Wonka communicating with the Oompa Loompa leader, in a combination of meaningful grunts and improvised sign language. The movie’s ambitious production numbers, featuring jillions of computer-generated Oompa Loompas, are clear, affectionate homages to Busby Berkeley (as well as the aforementioned Esther Williams).

And then there are those squirrels, with their alert ears and fluffed-out tails. The reality is that not all of these nut-inspecting prodigies are real, live squirrels. According to the movie’s press notes, Burton had his heart set on using live squirrels for the scene, but squirrels, though smart, are independent-minded little buggers and difficult to train. (In addition to the fact that their physiology prevents them from tossing nuts, or anything else for that matter, over their little shoulders.) So Burton had to settle for an artfully filmed combination of real squirrels and computer-generated and animatronic ones. You can kind of tell the difference, but it doesn’t much matter. As jaggedly problematic as it is, “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” couldn’t have emerged from anywhere but the dark, chambered nautilus of Burton’s imagination — in its best sections, it’s magically deranged in a way no other filmmaker could even come close to pulling off. The candyman can.

Tim Burton’s “Big Fish,” adapted by John August from Daniel Wallace’s book “Big Fish: A Novel of Mythic Proportions,” is a drearily affirming bit of whimsy about how life wouldn’t be worth living without tall tales, or even short, fat ones. You’d think that Burton, whose movies can be so invigoratingly nasty (“Beetlejuice”) or so hypnotically moody (“Sleepy Hollow”), would be able to pull off a gentle, mainstream crowd-pleaser without making it dull or preachy. But “Big Fish” is both.

Burton is a complicated director, more so than a finished product like “Big Fish” might lead you to believe: While I shy away from the chilly mean-spiritedness of “Mars Attacks!” I also think that Burton hasn’t gotten enough credit for the emotional richness (in addition to the more obvious visual kind) of pictures like “Batman” and the charming but also unexpectedly moving short “Frankenweenie.” I had high hopes for “Big Fish,” figuring that Burton would at least give me something fabulous to look at.

And while “Big Fish” is colorful (it was shot by Philippe Rousselot), it still manages to feel flat and listless. The score sounds unusually phoned-in and treacly for a Tim Burton movie, and as I watched the movie I wondered, “Where’s Danny Elfman when you need him?” — only to realize that the music was Elfman’s. And even though “Big Fish” features a number of Burtonian touches — like a neighborhood witch who, if you dare to look, can show you the moment of your death reflected in her glass eyeball — its zany inventiveness feels strained. It’s like a movie made by a Tim Burton impostor.

But there sure are lots of stories in “Big Fish,” and just about every one of them revolves around the cantankerously lovable Edward Bloom (Albert Finney, who gives some layers of depth to his character by being pleadingly sympathetic and yet not wholly likable). Edward is an inveterate weaver of tall tales, which annoys his son, Will (Billy Crudup), to no end. Will feels that he’s never gotten to know his father as a person: Edward has gone through life protecting himself from the drabness of reality with a shield of stories, nearly none of which Will believes. But now Edward has fallen ill, and Will — who has run off to a new life in Paris with his French wife (Marion Cotillard) — grudgingly returns home to take care of him. And, of course, the movie gives him the further mission of finding the grains of truth, spiritual or otherwise, in his father’s lulus.

Edward’s lifetime of stories unfolds before us, with Ewan McGregor — who has a good deal of cartoonish appeal here, although not much weight — playing the young Edward. We see him becoming a hero in his small Alabama town, first by becoming a star athlete, then by rescuing dogs from burning houses, and later by “saving” the town’s citizens from a not-so-frightening giant (played by Matthew McGrory). Realizing that he, like his new giant friend, is too big for this small town, he leaves home and discovers a Brigadoon-like village in which everyone seems happy all the time and no one ever wears shoes. Later, he joins a circus run by a shrimpy ringmaster (Danny DeVito). Later still, he falls in love at first sight with a sweet, radiant college girl named Sandra (Alison Lohman, who grows up to be Jessica Lange — a bit of genius casting). After that, he helps a poet-turned-bank robber (played by the always-wonderful Steve Buscemi, who is perhaps the most weirdly appealing performer in the whole movie) on the path to honest riches.

These are, of course, very broad stories, with very broad visuals to go with them: Edward shows up at Sandra’s doorstep with, quite literally, 10,000 daffodils (he has learned it’s her favorite flower). Stationed in the army in Korea, Edward cobbles a way to get home to the United States and to his beloved, taking with him a pair of bombshell Korean lounge singers who happen to be conjoined twins. (Played by Ada Tai and Arlene Tai, they’re one of the movie’s wittiest, and loveliest, images.) Everything here is supposed to be dreamy and unreal and bigger than life, because these are mythical tales, fabrications whose truth is ingrained in their spirit. Will, who has resisted his father’s fanciful ways of looking at the past, needs to give himself over to the meaning at the core of these stories before he can be redeemed.

But you just may have lost patience with everyone by the time that happens. Will can’t bring himself to act like a grown-up, even when his father is gravely ill: He comes off as simpering and self-involved almost right up to the end. Then again, by the jillionth time Edward launches into his characteristic story-tellin’ drawl (“Did ah evah tell you about the time ah used a pancake to fend off a man-eatin’ alligatah?” — OK, that one’s not in the movie, but it may as well be), you start wondering how many more tiresome tales this old windbag has in him.

I’m sure that’s not the effect Burton intends — he’s most certainly hoping to warm our hearts with this giant Sterno can of a movie. But there’s something garishly overcooked about “Big Fish.” It’s nicely made, well shot, and reasonably well acted, yet it’s enough to filet the life force right out of you. We need stories in order to dream, and to live. But that doesn’t mean we have to buy every crappy one that comes down the pike.

According to Variety, nothing’s a done deal yet, but Antonio Banderas’ name is being bandied about to play Stompanato, and Canadian director Francois Girard (“The Red Violin,” “Thirty-Two Short Films About Glenn Gould”) may direct.

And aren’t you proud of me for getting through that entire item without even once mentioning undies or komodo dragons?

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‘N clothing at all times

“No nude scenes.”

– ‘N Sync-er Joey Fatone on the limits on what he’ll do to make a go of it as an actor, in the New York Post.

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Batman’s revenge

David Schwimmer vants to suck your blood.

As a kid, the “Friends” actor liked to get creative on Fright Night. “I dressed as a different character every year at Halloween,” Schwimmer told New York gossipist Baird Jones at the premiere party for the NBC miniseries “Uprising,” which airs Nov. 4 and 5. “But my favorite was Dracula; I don’t know why.”

Could it have been the cape? That’s what attracted Hank Azaria to his favorite Halloween alter ego: Batman.

“I started [wearing my Batman costume] when I was 4 and wore it every year right through 9,” Azaria told Jones. “I always went solo because I never could convince anyone to be Robin.”

Which may have netted him sympathy candy. “Even though I only had a cheap cape and Batman head-cap and mask I bought from Woolworth’s for $5, I still cleaned up,” Azaria recalls. “Out in Forest Hills, [N.Y.], where I grew up, even a really cheap costume could still rake in the candy as long as you jumped around a lot in it.”

Azaria got a chance to do a little bonus Bat-jumping last year, too, he says, when he arrived at erstwhile celluloid Caped Crusader George Clooney’s house for a Halloween party … sans costume.

“George would not let me in unless I wore a costume,” Azaria says, “so I stuck this Bacardi Rum sticker on my chest to make it like a costume. It turned out to be a Batman design so I ended up being Batman again.”

Any volunteers to be his Robin?

I’m sure someone out there believes her

“Take some respect in yourself, feel proud that you’re choosy, vaginity [sic] is precious and a gift and is something to be proud of. It’s not some villanous [sic] disease that you’ve got to get rid of as soon as possible. Feel proud to be a virgin — I am!”

– Ex-Spice Girl and topless pinup Geri Halliwell advocating just saying no to nookie and stretching the bounds of credibility in an Internet chat with teenagers.

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Headed to Hogwarts

Who needs Hugh Grant?

Kenneth Branagh has agreed to take the role of Gilderoy Lockhart in “Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets,” the second Harry Potter film, which goes into production next month, Variety reports. At one point, there had been some speculation that Grant would take the role, but the floppy-haired actor’s scheduling conflicts apparently got in the way.

No matter. Branagh will no doubt please muggles and wizards alike with his portrayal.

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Bonham Carter/Burton monkey business?

Is Helena Bonham Carter the female Russell Crowe?

The actress who may have been responsible for the demise of Kenneth Branagh and Emma Thompson’s seemingly happy marriage has now been accused of wrecking yet another home.

Both the New York Post and the New York Daily News report that the actress is now dating Tim Burton, who directed her in “The Planet of the Apes.” And while Bonham Carter’s people insist that she and Burton didn’t get together until after he broke off his 10-year relationship with actress Lisa Marie, not everyone believes them.

And Bonham Carter’s publicist offers a somewhat dubious defense.

“How could she have had an affair [during the filming of 'Planet of the Apes']?” flack Melody Korenbrot told the Post. “She was in latex from head to toe.”

No, she didn’t say whether it was ribbed.

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Miss something? Read yesterday’s Nothing Personal.

Specials

Johnny Depp does a decent Buster Keaton impersonation in the sweet 1993 romantic comedy Benny & Joon (8 p.m., WB), about a mentally ill woman (Mary Stuart Masterson) who falls in love with a guy who, well, thinks he’s Buster Keaton.

Sports

Baseball:
Braves at Cardinals (8 p.m., TBS)

Talk

Rosie O’Donnell (syndicated) Matthew Broderick, Tisha Campbell (rerun)
David Letterman (CBS) Sean “P. Diddy” Combs, Daljit Dhaliwal
Jay Leno (NBC) Arsenio Hall, Blu Cantrell
Politically Incorrect (ABC) Steven R. Schirripa, Jerry Capeci
Conan O’Brien (NBC) Martha Stewart, Amy Sedaris (rerun)
Craig Kilborn (CBS) Jerry O’Connell, David Garza

All times Eastern unless noted.