Bonham Carter is animated, but she’s surely no cartoon

There are two sides to the animated Helena Bonham Carter.

There’s the dead chick with the rotting veil and the talking maggot in her eye socket. Then there’s the upper-crust society dame with the freaky orange hair and the passion for giant vegetables.

Bonham Carter provides the lead female voice for an unusual confluence of two animated films made through stop-motion techniques, which involves moving inanimate objects while photographing them one frame at a time.

First comes “Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride,” which opened Friday. Debuting Oct. 7 is “Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit,” a big-screen adventure featuring clay-animated British cheese fanatic Wallace and his loyal dog Gromit.

“The two are coming out so closely together, we just hope they’re not going to be pitted against each other,” said Bonham Carter, 39. “They’re both such totally different movies, and neither of them deserves that.”

“Corpse Bride” features Bonham Carter providing vocals for the title character, a woman slain the night before her wedding and buried in her bridal gown, who has been waiting for a husband to come and claim her. The blue-skinned, decomposing bride rises from her grave and says “I do” when a nervous bridegroom (voice by Johnny Depp) practicing his vows inadvertently slips her a ring, then whisks him away to the underworld as her eternal match.

“Wallace & Gromit,” from Aardman Animations, has the ever-upbeat Brit and his long-suffering canine pal running a humane pest-control service to keep rabbits from ravaging produce just before the town’s annual giant veggie contest.

Peter Sallis is back as mouthpiece for Wallace, who encounters a monster bunny and a nasty rival (Ralph Fiennes) for the affections of Bonham Carter’s Lady Tottingham, the patron of the vegetable competition.

For Lady Tottingham, Bonham Carter developed a perky, gushing voice modeled somewhat after a friend of her mother.

“England’s riddled with Lady Ts. A garden-loving upper-class lady of a certain age,” Bonham Carter said at the Toronto International Film Festival. “When you go upper-class, you can become very unsympathetic, because you sort of close your mouth and get very, very snooty. … That wasn’t going to work for Lady T, who’s this sympathetic and kindhearted, full of love, open, peace-loving, carrot-loving thing.”

For the Corpse Bride, Burton wanted Bonham Carter to bring her deep voice up.

“He said, `I want her light, and I want her to have a purity and an innocence,”’ Bonham Carter said. “I analyzed the character and thought, because she was frozen in time, stuck, actually perpetually young because she was killed on the eve of her wedding, that meant a voice with a great deal of spontaneity, always so excited.”

The birthday bunch

Newswoman Barbara Walters is 74. Actor Michael Douglas is 61. Model Cheryl Tiegs is 58. Actress Mimi Kennedy is 56. Actor Mark Hamill is 54. Actor Michael Madsen is 47. Actress Heather Locklear is 44. Actress Aida Turturro is 43. Actor Will Smith is 37. Actress Catherine Zeta-Jones is 36. Actress Bridgette Wilson is 32. Singer Diana Ortiz of Dream is 20.