"Todd" opening credits

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Broadway World has an exclusive video clip of the opening credits to Tim Burton's Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (Dreamamount, 12.21). It'll certainly give you an idea about where the aesthetic emphasis lies, or at least what's important to Burton. My favorite parts of the film have little if anything to do with vivid red plasma. I'm speaking of at least 95% of the running time.

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Posted by Jeffrey Wells on December 12, 2007 at 2:49 PM

comment #1

MiraJeffAICN says ...

Jeff, thanks a mil for posting this. I got to the screening 10 minutes late and when I asked some folks afterwards what I missed they said one of the best opening credit sequences of the year, so this was post was tailor-made for me. Very cool.

Posted by MiraJeffAICN at December 12, 2007 3:37 PM

comment #2

Dan Revill says ...

Weird, just watched it and headed over here to see if you'd posted the link yet. Anyhow, great credits. They remind me of Edward Scissorhands' credits a bit, and that isn't a bad thing at all.

Posted by Dan Revill at December 12, 2007 3:55 PM

comment #3

Breedlove says ...

Seeing this tomorrow night. Looking forward to it. No one has said much so far about how Sasha Baron Cohen comes off...I'm curious...seems like a very shrewd choice post-Borat if he can pull it off.

Posted by Breedlove at December 12, 2007 4:13 PM

comment #4

Edward says ...

Very cool, can't wait.

Posted by Edward at December 12, 2007 4:35 PM

comment #5

Sefster says ...

All and all, we're just another brick in the wall...

Posted by Sefster at December 12, 2007 4:36 PM

comment #6

actionman says ...

Looks very, very cool, if maybe a little overly CGI...but I am psyched...this and There Will Be Blood are the last two films for the year I am really excited to see...and Charlie Wilson's War but not as much as the other two.

Posted by actionman at December 12, 2007 4:40 PM

comment #7

tophertilson says ...

I love this title sequence, though watching it on my teeny laptop screen with my crappy Mac built in speakers doesn't begin to compare with seeing it in a good theatre with good sound.

Cohen is fantastically weird in this. He's only in two scenes, mind you, but he does them well. He's got a great visual gag on his entrance. The musical theatre crowd I saw it with ate it up. Read that however you like.

Posted by tophertilson at December 12, 2007 4:52 PM

comment #8

John Y says ...

I still can't figure this title sequence out. When I saw them at a screening, it comes across as so obviously CGI that I thought Burton had to intend it to look animated, as if they belonged in an illustrated storybook.

But now I'm not sure. Is this a case of really bad CGI, or of deliberately cartoony CGI? And if the latter, why would Burton make that choice?

More than one person at my screening said out loud, "This looks fake." That kind of reaction, even if it's misguided, takes you out of the movie.

Posted by John Y at December 12, 2007 5:50 PM

comment #9

mizerock says ...

The title sequence is obviously and intentionally "fake" - it's CGI + actual stop-motion, or maybe CGI styled to look like stop-motion? It gives a cartoonish tour of the sets that we will revisit in live-action at some point later in the movie. That was the real payoff for me - "oh, we've been here before" - but of course it's more dirty and brutal and foul in "real life" than when we first saw these set pieces in the title sequence.

Yeah, the cheap / obviously fake look to the title sequence threw me too, for the first few seconds, but then I just went with it. We KNOW that Tim Burton COULD make the animation photo-realistic and filled with intricate, life-like detail if that was his intent - so obviously it must be a design choice. 100% cool.

Posted by mizerock at December 13, 2007 6:52 AM

comment #10