The Emotional and Symbolic Role of Color in Corpse Bride 2005

This article investigates the symbolic and emotional roles of color in Corpse Bride (2005), a full-length stop-motion picture directed by Tim Burton and Mike Johnson. Using a qualitative research method, the method of color utilization is used to illustrate the characters, and the dichotomy of the sociocultural conditions depicted in the two story settings within the film. The applied colors convey emotional impressions and symbolic meanings, which can be attributed to the theories of color aesthetics expressed by Johannes Itten. Both the lighting color and color of visual elements imply various meanings, reflecting the characters' moods and feelings as well as their social, cultural contexts and the atmosphere of their places. The filmmakers have been successful in this attempt as they use colors artfully for specific times and places of the story. Generally, in Burton’s films, the protagonist journeys to a colored world, sometimes through a means of transition or passing through a rabbit-hole. In Corpse Bride, the hero struggles between the two worlds of the dead and living. One is designed in a boring and miserable atmosphere like a living world, it is in contrast with the dead world, which is colorful with sense of vitality of life and freeness. The living world is concurrent with the Victorian era (19th century Britain), experiencing the dominant issues of the Industrial Revolution. As the story takes place in this period, the study describes how the applied colors work as the elements showing the moods and emotional feelings of the characters that living world is expressed with their own specific colors. The directors presented such a difference through using types of opposing colors. Two color palettes constitute the color values utilized to depict the world. Each palette contains colors to help reflect particular traits of its own world which root in its ruling ideology and the hero’s attitudes, behaviors and beliefs. Therefore, the colors in the dead world are pure saturated values that depict a pleasant atmosphere, whereas a range of saturated values in gray illustrate the living world to be depressing and gloomy. In fact, the directors reveal the unhappy feelings of the living world through a series of combined gray colors to show its residents in their own society involved with strict matters and hardships. The film shows two types of worlds, one extracted from the real world and the other comes from their imagination. Although they both display the places of a story, they are considerably different in terms of their creation as parts of visual elements for an animated film. Developing the living world’s concept, the directors might be assisted by experiences of the real world as they know, as well as studying the Victorian era, while creation of the dead world was only dependent on his imagination of such an unseen world. Thus, the main significant reason for showing these objective and subjective worlds was the particular utilization of color in order to contrast and depict the mindset attributed to each place.