The puppets used neither of the industry standards of replaceable heads (like those used on The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993)) or replaceable mouths (like those used by Aardman Studios in Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit (2005)), but instead used precision crafted clockwork heads, adjusted by hidden keys. This allowed for unprecedented subtlety, but was apparently even more painstaking than the already notoriously arduous animation. One animator even reported having recurring nightmares of adjusting his own facial expression in this fashion.
The puppets were 25 to 28 centimeters (9.8 to 11 inches) tall, and some of the stages were so large that animators could actually fit through the set doors with minimal crouching.
Composer Danny Elfman originally wrote the part of Bonejangles, looking for another musician to sing it, but after failing to find a voice that fit, director Tim Burton asked Elfman if he would sing it. The result was so brutal on his vocal chords that Elfman was left hoarse whenever he had to voice the character.
The movie had a 55-week shoot and included 109,440 individually animated frames set up and filmed.
Multiple identical puppets had to be created, so that more scenes could be accomplished in a shorter period of time. In all, fourteen puppets of the Bride and Victor were created, and thirteen were created of Victoria.
Tim Burton: [dead dog] Victor is reunited with his deceased (and now skeletal) dog, Scraps. A picture of a younger Victor with a living Scraps is visible at the start of the movie.
Tim Burton: [Alfred Hitchcock] A shot of multiple crows looking down on Victor is filmed as a homage to the shots of multiple birds looking down in The Birds (1963).
Tim Burton: [distorted female face] Emily and other characters appear in varying stages of death and decay.
Tim Burton: [classical music] Excerpts from Richard Wagner's operas Tannhauser and Lohengrin can be heard on the soundtrack. The song Victor plays on the piano early in the movie, resembles Ludwig van Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata.
Tim Burton: [Dracula] For a moment, as Elder Gutknecht reaches out in his tower, the shadow of his arm passes across the candlelit wall, much like a famous scene in Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror (1922). Hammer Films' Count Dracula Christopher Lee provides the voice of Pastor Galswells.