The first trailer for Sweeney Todd, Tim Burton’s adaptation of Kevin Smith’s favorite musical, is here, and it does its damnedest to hide the fact that it’s a musical. You only get a hint of singing, and that’s in a sequence that appears so highly stylized that many people might think it’s a dream or something. I guess you have to ease audiences into the singing thing.
Which is too bad, since opening the trailer with ‘Attend the tale of Sweeney Todd/His skin was pale and his eye was odd/He shaved the faces of gentlemen/Who never thereafter were heard from again’ would have been a nice way of summing it all up. Much nicer than having the ‘In a world where…’ guy gargle some gasoline to sound creepier. And it’s interesting that some of the more gruesome elements – the cannibalism is what I’m thinking here – have been left out. What will turn off audiences faster: Johnny Depp breaking into operatic song or Johnny Depp feeding the rich to the poor?
I guess everything else looks fine… I would like to see Burton and Wes Anderson get together and see their different movies-as-dollhouses aesthetics clash. They sort of look like Bizarro versions of each other these days as well.
Click here to see the trailer.