“Corpse Bride,” the latest animated film to spring from the mind of Tim Burton, is the last thing you’d expect to find in the toxic dumping ground of belly-up behemoths and embarrassing misfires that we like to call the end of summer: It’s a good movie.

Victor (voiced by Johnny Depp) is a lanky lad who likes to sketch butterflies and plink out a little Wagner on his Harryhausen piano, but youth’s a stuff that will not endure, and his nouveau riche parents (who built a fortune on fish) have arranged his marriage to the daughter of the cash-embarrassed, titled aristocrats across the plaza. Her name is Victoria (Emily Watson); his name is Victor.

This is just one of many throwaway jokes that pop up in this film and then quickly go away, as good jokes should. Most comedies I’ve seen recently hoard every gag like misers, as if they had to wrest their jokes from some near-depleted mine in a far-off country. “Corpse Bride” doesn’t have this problem because its script is an avalanche of puns, wordplay, and cribs from pop culture high and low (“The Amityville Horror” rubs references with Charles Dickens’ “Our Mutual Friend”).

Victor and Victoria meet for the first time on the eve of their wedding and take to each other instantly, mostly because neither is as horrible as the other feared. But after having his confidence shaken by the vicar (Christopher Lee, as magisterial as a battleship) Victor heads to the haunted forest to practice his vows and accidentally marries Emily (Helena Bonham Carter).

Emily is charming, a good dancer, an ace piano player, and a thoughtful girl who has one minor flaw: She’s dead. This being a Tim Burton movie, she’s not just dead, she’s completely, irrevocably, unmistakably dead. Cyanide blue, with a hole in her cheek, an eyeball that keeps popping out, and a talking maggot with the face of Peter Lorre in her brains. She couldn’t possibly be mistaken for a living woman, even if the lights were very, very dim and you’d had far too much to drink.

Delighted to be married, Emily whisks her groom off to the Land of the Dead. Compared to the gray, water stained world of the living, Deadville is a 24-hour fiesta rocking to the beat of a non-stop skeleton band and packed to the brim with corpses, severed heads, and black widows. “Everyone’s dying to get here,” a dusty skeleton explains, and with good reason: It’s fun. But Victor still has a problem: This is the Land of the Dead, not Utah, and Victor’s got two wives.

Despite the limitations of stop-motion animation, where every camera movement, hand gesture, fold of fabric, and blink of an eye has to be meticulously planned months in advance, “Corpse Bride” is riotously alive. The actors may be puppets whose expressions have to be changed with tiny wrenches, but they are more convincingly life-like than Vin Diesel, and – voiced by deep-dyed stage hounds (Richard E. Grant, Albert Finney, Joanna Lumley) – they’re better actors, too.

At only 78 minutes, the movie is like one of its skeletons: fast moving and trimmed of all its fat. There’s a second act slump as the narrative gathers its strength for a third-act rampage, but the joke that breaks the silence is a surreally sweet and completely unexpected mass encounter between the living and the dead. It’s a broadly comic and emotionally accurate moment, the kind of brainy gesture that this movie whips at you with effortless ease.

Mr. Burton (who co-directed with Mike Johnson) is becoming the Walt Disney of our generation: a brand name whose movies meet our expectations with the brisk efficiency of a McDonald’s. “The Little Mermaid” may be replaced by a dead corpse, but the films follow the Disney formula: some songs, some dances, and true love triumphs over all. Mr. Disney’s workshop turned out art for 30 years before it started churning out junk, and Mr. Burton still has time for exquisite craftsmanship.

In a perfect world, his movies would just be average. In the current marketplace they’re pure gold.