Corpse Bride: spiritual art?

I saw Tim Burton's Corpse Bride this weekend. It's like Edward Scissorhands in hiding good thoughtfulness under gore and pop-culture jokes, and surprised me with one of the most beautiful and unabashedly spiritual images I’ve ever seen in a film. (In case you plan to see Corpse Bridge for the plot and not the graphics, be warned: spoilers herein. Bookmark this and come back when you’ve seen it!)

Basically, it’s about a young man who, on the eve of a parentally-imposed-but-mutually-welcomed marriage, accidentally proposes vows to an animate female corpse. (For metaphysical intents and purposes, the corpses function as ghosts—souls who haven’t made it anywhere else yet—except that instead of the classic sinking-through-the-floor jokes, you have maggot-ridden-flesh jokes, which aren’t quite as grisly as they sound.) Backed by a ghoulish canon lawyer, the corpse, Emily, chases Victor around declaring love; he tries to trick her so he can get back to his living bride, Victoria; a baddie pops up to try to wed Victoria by force; and everything works out in the end.

The image I loved is at the end of the movie. Victor, who thought Victoria was shackled to the baddie, had come to admire Emily and was prepared to kill himself so he could marry her with right intent in the underworld. But Emily releases him, saying she herself had been released by Victor’s willingness to love her. As the living lovers and the dead congregation celebrate, Emily steps into the moonlight door of the church and, with a thankful sigh, dissolves into a cloud of butterflies.

At the beginning of the movie, Victor sketched a butterfly imprisoned in a bell jar. Just as its fluttering began to falter from lack of air, he lifted the cover and let it fly out into the sky. The journey that followed brought him freedom and joy in a marriage he had feared. Emily’s “release” refers to this image and enlarges it, keeping us from suspecting that any one butterfly might be Emily in a different form, but leaving us with no doubt that a part of Emily will continue.

In the film, Emily’s body, though built after Hollywood standards, was crumbling and decaying and sometimes a burden. Her graceful exit showed her comfort at leaving the body and her trust that her spirit would not be destroyed. It made me envy her her peace. In a film so honestly and ridiculously supernatural, a moment that could have been just another magic trick seemed like the natural course of life, in the most fortunate of possible cases.