Wood supplies the voice for 9, the last in a series of zippered, goggle-eyed burlap sock-puppets who've had the spark of life zapped into them by a scientist who may have been the last living human on the planet. 9 wakes up with his creator dead on the floor in front of him, and opens the window to find a devastated city that has apparently been destroyed at the height of an industrial civilization that was simultaneously high-tech and not quite modern, exactly the combination for which the already-overused neologism "steampunk" was invented. Acker builds a tremendous atmosphere of menace and mystery in these early scenes, as the voiceless 9 wanders through a ruined, dead landscape patrolled by a fearsome, feline robot known only as the Beast.

Indeed, when the storytelling of "9" is purely visual, without much explanation or exposition, it's haunting and highly effective. One of the monsters 9 and his homespun compadres must face, a sinister, cobra-like creepy-crawly that simultaneously suggests the evil snakes of Kipling's "Rikki-Tikki-Tavi" and the undead Nazgûl of "Lord of the Rings," might be the scariest creature I've seen in a movie all year. And when one of the nine living puppets is killed and must be given a solemn funeral, at a moment when the group's mission to preserve their last fragmentary piece of planetary life amid a hateful wilderness seems doomed to pathetic failure, I felt a genuine upsurge of emotion.

But a 90-minute mass-market motion picture demands a conventional narrative, and the more of it Acker and screenwriter Pamela Pettler supply, the more conventional it becomes. Our tiny group of burlap survivors is divided into factions, one loyal to the stern and conservative 1 (Christopher Plummer), who sports a bishop's miter and crook and urges caution, and the other to the renegade warrior 7 (Jennifer Connelly), who sports a skull mask and stages guerrilla attacks against the robot overlords. You get exactly one guess which of these characters -- oh, forget it, no you don't.

Furthermore, a bunch of the film's relatively brief running time is devoted to unpacking a back story we can pretty much figure out from context: These little homunculi find themselves at the tail end of a genocidal war between humans and machines, launched when the superpowerful robot warriors turned against their creators. Naturally enough, there's a magic whatsit encoded with mystical symbols (not a ring exactly, though it kind of looks like one), which 9 and his Sancho Panza-like one-eyed co-puppet, 5 (John C. Reilly), must carry into the deep, dark, brooding lair of the Beast and then -- no! For God's sake don't stick it there! Too late.

Produced under the aegis of both Burton and Russian director Timur Bekmambetov ("Wanted" and the "Day Watch"/"Night Watch" series), "9" presents a wildly uneven mixture of ingredients. On one hand, it's an earnest, loving attempt to expand Acker's 2004 Oscar-nominated short into a full-length movie; the animation looks fantastic and the range of voice talents (also including Martin Landau and Crispin Glover) is impressive. On the other hand, the story is a half-assed jumble of the hackneyed and half-familiar, and once you get past how cool the movie looks, so is Acker's created universe.

In the end-of-summer battle between two numerologically obsessed fantasy-director protégés, Neill Blomkamp's "District 9" is the clear winner. Blomkamp's giant-prawns-from-space apartheid allegory combined a bunch of sci-fi movie archetypes with a real-life setting to create a world nobody had ever seen on screen before, while Acker has created a fitful combination of beautiful, dreamlike images that never knit together forcefully enough to seem individual or convincing. I'll remember that undead snake-critter years from now. What movie was it in? I'm already starting to forget.

• A bewildering adult fantasy, adapted from a literary source, that features four different actors playing the same role and also includes the final performance of a recently departed star (no, really -- his final final performance), directed by a one-time rebel genius now viewed as both a loose cannon and box-office poison.
• A bewildering adult fantasy, adapted from a literary source and shot almost entirely in a green-screen, effects-driven process that makes its director (he says) "jittery and crazy." Said director is a one-time rebel genius now viewed as an underperforming Hollywood hack.
• A remake of a breakthrough American indie crime drama of the '80s, made in a foreign language by a director who himself made more than one breakthrough indie crime drama in the '80s.
• A remake of a breakthrough foreign-language film of the '60s about an intense, crypto-erotic relationship between two women, sexed up and made contemporary as a comeback vehicle for two flagging post-teen stars.
• A remake of a red-meat, Red Scare action film of the '80s, sexed up and made contemporary as a vehicle for the offspring of a flagging mega-star.
• Approximately the umpteenth adaptation of a tear-jerking literary classic read widely by teenagers, to be scripted by a major American writer who seems uniquely unsuited for the task.

So how did we do? Too easy, right? I would agree, but I would further contend that my fake idea is no worse than the third- or fourth-worst idea on this list. And yeah, maybe I cheated by including one movie that actually exists, along with another one that's partway along. That's not the point, if I have one; the point is to argue that the movie-supply pipeline of the moment seems jampacked with baffling, half-baked ideas that, y'know, could surprise us and be pretty good, but have a really high potential of turning out to be incredibly awful and/or memorably bizarre, and very likely belong in the category of Someone Should Have Thought About This a Little Bit Harder.

Now, to review. In order, as above:

"The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus" Yes, the latest addition to Terry Gilliam's oo-ver is an actual, completed motion picture that will apparently be released this fall. Doesn't quite seem that way, though, does it? Gilliam's effects-driven, unsummarizable, Munchausen-scale fantasy -- which does indeed feature four actors playing one role, and stars the late Heath Ledger alongside Johnny Depp -- premiered this spring at Cannes, to mixed and tepid response. That's neither a positive nor a negative; dark, indigestible films don't do well at film festivals (this is known as the "Synecdoche, New York" problem). This movie has a higher profile than anything Gilliam has made since God knows when -- "12 Monkeys," maybe? -- but given his propensity for muddled aesthetic results and commercial failure, that's not saying a whole lot.

My personal feeling is that Gilliam has been so badly burned by the forges of the film industry's Saurons that he's morphed from Sméagol to Gollum -- he's become a perennially sour old dude who has lost all sense of how to reach audiences. I know he's got fans out there, because I hear from y'all every time I complain about him, so let me state what should be obvious: Gilliam is a rare, acerbic talent with genius-level skills in composition and design, and one of these years he might cough up a good movie. Thing is, I'm tired of waiting -- and unlike almost everybody else in North America, I actually sat through "Tideland," the hackneyed, cruel and thoroughly poisonous Alice-in-Wonderland knockoff that was his last film. Go watch that -- no, I'm serious, go right now; the rest of us will wait -- and then come back and tell me what a big fan you are.

Here's the British trailer for "Imaginarium," which New York magazine's Vulture blog has summed up as "something you'd dream after eating some bad clams and falling asleep in a sauna":

"Alice in Wonderland" Now we come to Tim Burton's effects-driven spectacular in the offing, and I got stuck trying to define exactly what relationship Burton bears to Terry Gilliam. He's the rich man's Gilliam? He's the saner, less evil member of a pair of evil-genius twins? I can't quite figure it out. I know, I know, you're very excited that Burton is finally making a Lewis Carroll adaptation, he seems perfect for it, etc. There's a huge gap here, in that none of the screen versions of "Alice" is fully satisfactory, and I absolutely agree that Burton's trailer looks gorgeous, exactly the kind of vaguely sinister visual candyfloss that made his reputation.

But let's be honest here: Burton has a terrible record with adaptations ("Sleepy Hollow," anyone? "Planet of the Apes"? Didn't think so) and if the story's not about a damaged Goth kid, he doesn't know how to tell it. There's a real risk here that this "Alice" will wind up with Johnny Depp's Mad Hatter as the main character, who happens to meet some chick from another world. And as for making Alice a fully pulchritudinous young adult instead of a little girl, doesn't that risk pushing Dr. Freud even closer to the surface of the film? Again, just personally, I was greatly and pleasantly surprised by Burton's take on "Sweeney Todd," mostly because I wasn't expecting much, but expectations are already off the charts for this one. In case you haven't seen the trailer, or need another look:

Zhang Yimou's "Blood Simple" remake There were some startled blogosphere reactions to the idea that the director of "Raise the Red Lantern" and "Hero" is set to stage a Chinese-language remake of Joel and Ethan Coen's hallowed 1984 debut film. I'm here to tell you that I think it's a tremendous idea. Several of Zhang's best movies have a pronounced noir element, slowed down and adapted to the rhythms of life in rural China. And here comes the moment where I blow my so-called indie cred: I don't like "Blood Simple" that much. It's really well made, but it's one Coen movie that totally earns their rep as sadistic and smirky. I'll probably like Zhang's version better.

Britney Spears-Lindsay Lohan "Persona" remake Sadly, this does not exist. Yet. Awesome idea, though, right? I'm hereby offering to write and produce, hopefully launching myself on a Zalman King-like trajectory as softcore mogul of the 2010s. Screw the moody, black-and-white cinematography of the original, of course -- but you know that scene when Bibi Andersson tells the story about how she and her hot friend get it on with some kid on the beach? What we do with that scene is gonna put the whoot-there-it-is back in avant-garde cinema, my friends. (And that moment where the film breaks and all sorts of crazy shit happens is a good spot for some product placement: BK, Red Bull, Captain Morgan.)

Connor Cruise "Red Dawn" remake This is just depressing and there are all sorts of reasons I don't want to think about it, let alone write about it (or, still worse, actually watch it). Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman's 14-year-old adopted son, Connor, has joined the cast of a remake of John Milius' Cold War action flick "Red Dawn," to be directed by Dan Bradley, which sounds like a porn-star name but is actually the name of a dude who shot second-unit on the Bourne films. Evidently this reheated Red Scare paranoia exercise will involve the premise that Russian and Chinese troops are invading the American heartland and -- I'm sorry, that's enough.

Mind you, I might want to act all high-minded, but I'm pretty sure I paid to see the Milius film on the big screen myself, so OK. Since we're casting celebrities' kids in remakes of popular '80s films that the world would have gotten along fine without in the first place, there's also a "Karate Kid" remake in the works, with Will Smith's son to play opposite Jackie Chan. Your suggestions please! "Back to the Future"? "Fast Times at Ridgemont High"? "Dirty Dancing"?

David Mamet "Anne Frank" project So by the time I get around to deriding the news that irascible man's-man playwright and screenwriter Mamet has been hired to write and direct a version of "The Diary of Anne Frank," not just one but two parody excerpts have already been scribbled by my competitors. Neither is pitch-perfect -- Mamet's voice is so distinctive that mocking it is quite difficult -- but I think the Village Voice version is closer, and much funnier, than the New York magazine attempt.

It ought to be more like this:

Anne: What do they want? The people who ...
Peter: People? What people? The Nazis? Is that what you mean? The fucking Nazis? [Laughs.]
Otto: Peter. The child. She's just a child.
Peter: She's a child? A child? You're a fucking child. No, no, I'm sorry. I take that back. I apologize. I fully and freely apologize. I'm the child here. Let's be honest.
Anne: The people who will come here ...
Otto: When I was a child, there was a river. No, a stream, not a river. A river is ...
Peter: Roaring. A river is roaring.
Anne: What will they do? What do they want?
Otto: Yes, roaring. That's right. A stream gurgles. It gurgles.
Peter: Where was this stream? When you were a child? It was at your house? Your house, or someone else's?
Otto: Yes. No. Perhaps it was my grandmother's house. Perhaps it wasn't near a house. I was a child.
Anne: I think about what they will do. But I can't imagine it. You can't imagine something like that.
Peter: Did you throw stones in it? In the gurgling stream? I love to throw stones. That is one thing that I love.
Otto: I did. I threw them. I think I threw them. Or I am saying it because you said those words. How can I be sure?
Anne: I am asking you a question! What will they do when they come to this house?
Peter: They will fuck us with their big uncircumcised cocks and they will suck the marrow from our bones. Is there anything else that you would like to know?

These are more like art songs than show tunes, attempts at Brechtian insight and scale, which I presume is Sondheim's design: Anyone looking for hummable toe-tappers of the "Chicks and geese and ducks better scurry" variety should go play elsewhere. Only a shallow person would expect an actual melody to accompany lyrics of such nihilist significance as "There's a hole in the world like a great black pit/ and it's filled with people who are filled with shit/ And the vermin of the world inhabit it." This is complex, important music, people! Not for simple, cheerful folk by any means.

I'm fully prepared to be damned to show-tune hell -- or even just baked into a meat pie -- for failing to grasp Stephen Sondheim's brilliance. Still, no matter what I think of the music in "Sweeney Todd," I'm willing to believe there have been terrific, entertaining stage productions of the show that both make the most of the story's grim wit and make you feel something for the characters.

But in this "Sweeney Todd," Burton has ground those possibilities into a grayish chalky powder. The picture throws off no feeling, not even the misanthropic kind; at best, it manages a dull, throbbing energy, as if Burton were dutifully pushing his way through the material instead of shaping it.

Johnny Depp is Benjamin Barker, an embittered soul who has spent 15 years in prison in Australia for a crime he never committed. He escapes and returns to London, where he sets out to reopen his business: In his former life, he'd been a barber, an occupation that makes him uniquely suited to avenge the man who has ruined his life, the slithery Judge Turpin (Alan Rickman): It was Turpin who sent Barker up the river, getting him out of the way so he could steal his wife and child. Barker adopts a new name, Sweeney Todd, and reclaims the space where his old tonsorial parlor used to be, above a sleepy shop run by Mrs. Nellie Lovett (Helena Bonham Carter), a chatty widow who makes a meager living selling leaden meat pies that few people can bring themselves to eat. Todd, after slitting a throat or two (though not the one he's really after), inspires Mrs. Lovett to add new, improved ingredients to her staple product, which turns her moribund enterprise into a roaring success.

The dark, glinting subtexts of this little story -- which is adapted from popular lore that came into being long before there was a Stephen Sondheim -- are many: Given half a chance, humankind will think nothing of devouring its own. Even people who do very bad things long for love and connection. And, most significantly, the lust for revenge can destroy a man's soul.

Burton seems as well suited as anyone to make something of this material: He's visually attuned to moody, velvety Victorian colors and textures, and in pictures like "Edward Scissorhands" (or, one of my personal Burton favorites, the compact and marvelous "Frankenweenie"), he has always been clued in to the way people in pain are so easily misunderstood. And even though his animated musicals have proved to be sturdier and more fun than his live-action ones (for my money, "Corpse Bride" and "The Nightmare Before Christmas" both trump the garish though sometimes enjoyably nutty "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory"), he knows how to use songs to shape a story into a meaty whole.

But this "Sweeney Todd" -- adapted by John Logan -- is all subtext and no substance. It starts off large and swaggering but doesn't know where to turn next: Burton seems fixated on serving up an event, to the extent that he neglects to dig into the story. The musical numbers feel heavy yet weirdly weightless, almost as if the performers were just hustling their way through them without trying to extract any meaning. (Fans of the stage version should also note that Burton has cut several numbers, including the title song.) Depp connects with Barker's anguished soul in only a cursory way. It's not that his singing is bad; it's just that his bitterness floats on the surface instead of running deep. Bonham Carter does manage to make her character work believably. She's not an exceptional singer, but she does have that touching quality you sometimes see in actors who've learned how to sing for a role: She summons a solid performance out of sheer determination, and there's something affecting about the world-weary youthfulness of her street urchin face -- she plays Mrs. Lovett as a scrapper who has had to learn to survive, yet she has the forlorn fragility of a wax doll that has been left forgotten in the attic.

But the picture, shot in muddy raincoat colors by Darisz Wolski, is so drab that it becomes exhausting to look at. Burton spills plenty of blood, letting it spurt and spray freely, but the display is joyless without being particularly horrifying, either -- there's something perfunctory and inconsequential about it. "Sweeney Todd" springs to life briefly when Sacha Baron Cohen, as rival barber Signor Adolfo Pirelli, sashays onto the screen: His flamboyant flouncing channels the spirit of character actor Erik Rhodes, who graced several of the Astaire-Rogers musicals with his intentionally phoney European elegance. But Cohen's role is small, and once he's gone, "Sweeney Todd" sweeps us back into its great black pit. As human beings -- the vermin of the world who inhabit it -- we're not part of the solution, we're part of the problem, and so maybe this dingy, uninteresting movie is all we deserve. Welcome to the dark side. That will be $11.50, please.

"Corpse Bride," which Burton co-directed with Mike Johnson, begins with a wedding gone wrong. Canned-fish magnates Nell and William Van Dort (their voices belong to Tracey Ullman and Paul Whitehouse) have money but no class; and Maudeline and Finis Everglot (Joanna Lumley and Albert Finney) have aristocratic roots but no dough. The families decide to merge by arranging a marriage between their respective children, Victor (Johnny Depp) and Victoria (Emily Watson), who, as of the night before the wedding, have never even met. They fall in love, of course, at first sight. But by a curious turn of events, Victor accidentally stumbles into the world of Emily, the Corpse Bride (Helena Bonham Carter), who was killed by her intended on her wedding day. Her heart, she notes, is capable of being broken even though it has stopped beating. And she desperately wants Victor to be her husband, even though he's betrothed to someone else.

So Emily conveys Victor to the Land of the Dead, an underground world rendered in vivid jellybean colors, a far cry from the muted gray Victorian reality Victor knows. But that world is home to Victor, and he aches to get back to it. "Corpse Bride" was written by John August, Caroline Thompson and Pamela Pettler, and as a piece of storytelling, it holds up admirably against any live-action script. The story is beautifully worked out, and it gets most of its momentum from the feelings of the characters. There's Victor, charming but hapless at first, whose strengths are ultimately magnified by his compassion for a person in pain; the steady and true Victoria, left to believe that Victor has willingly abandoned her for someone else; and, most affecting of all, the fragile but vital Emily, who sees Victor as her last chance at happiness -- the only other option for her is to face the rest of eternity alone.

The world of "Corpse Bride" is so vivid that it's hard to believe these are puppets we're talking about. Victor, with his saucer eyes and brilliantined forelock, looks more like the human Johnny Depp than Depp himself did in "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory." And Emily, perched on matchstick ballerina legs (on one of them, her flesh has rotted away and you can see an exposed flash of bone, a disconcertingly erotic visual), is a specter of tragic love wrapped in tattered wedding clothes. Her nose is a pert inverted "V"; her lips have a sensual pout that suggests not even death can fully destroy the human sex drive.

Emily's world is populated by singing, dancing skeletons (they perform several songs composed by longtime Burton collaborator Danny Elfman, including a rousing Gilbert and Sullivan-style ensemble number); by beings who used to be soldiers or waiters or bakers in life and just can't break the habit even now that they're dead (some of these skills come in handy when it's time to make the couple's wedding cake, a towering creation festooned with fondant skulls and femurs); and by tiny, mischievous skeleton kiddies (they tiptoe through the movie, giggling, in their little Victorian frocks and sailor outfits). There's an ick-green talking maggot who takes after Peter Lorre (his voice actually belongs to Enn Reitel) and a dog named Scraps, Victor's beloved, deceased childhood pet -- Emily presents him to Victor as a wedding present. He's now a butt-wriggling assemblage of bones, but his essential spirit of doggyness is undiminished.

It's a tossup as to what's more appealing, the rainbow-hued Land of the Dead, beneath the Earth's surface, or the grayish Land of the Living up above. There's definitely more fun going on down below, with lots of live dead entertainment and an eternally open bar. (As a wise old dead elder, voiced by Michael Gough, observes, "Why go up there when people are dying to get down here?")

But the colors in the Land of the Living are more subtly beautiful: There are endless variations of grays, and Burton (along with his clearly hardworking technical team) uses the whole palette, tinting this allegedly boring color with pinks and blues and violets. The delicacy of these creamy tones suits the passionate but tender nature of the story, and their earthbound beauty fits the movie's realistically romantic theme: Love isn't ownership, and it's no good unless it's freely given. "Tim Burton's Corpse Bride" is a lush, modern valentine to old-fashioned sentiment, and to old-fashioned moviemaking, too. When Victor sits down at a grand piano, we see that it features a brass plate inscribed with "Harryhausen" in majestic letters, a tribute to special-effects genius Ray Harryhausen, whose work is so lovingly referenced here. Harryhausen is now 85, and although today's kids may not know who he is, many of yesterday's kids do, from Saturday-afternoon movie staples like "Jason and the Argonauts" and "The Golden Voyage of Sinbad." With "Corpse Bride," Burton and Johnson pay tribute to the people, and the techniques, that have inspired them. Their movie is a living love letter, not a memento mori.

"Charlie and the Chocolate Factory" is absinthe in movie form, a white chocolate space egg of a picture that has a giddy hallucinatory quality in some places and an overcalculated glossiness in others. But for better or worse, it's fascinating. Burton's movie may be truer to the mischievously misanthropic spirit of Roald Dahl's 1964 novel than the 1971 Mel Stuart musical "Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory" was: Burton picks up on the weird, sadistic streak of Willy Wonka, the reclusive, eccentric owner of a giant candy factory who barely even bothers to pretend to like children. In some ways Burton and Depp take the sadism, and the weirdness, too far, but at least you can't accuse them of trying to file down Dahl's magnificently pointy teeth. The screenplay, by John August (who also wrote the script for Burton's last picture, the treacle-glazed "Big Fish," adapted from Daniel Wallace's novel), has snap and bite and a certain degree of warped loopiness (as when Depp's glassy-eyed Wonka greets his public with a crisply enunciated, "Good morning, starshine -- the earth says hello!"). The dialogue is reasonably faithful to the source material, at least in its tone, and Danny Elfman has written a handful of mildly catchy songs using Dahl's original lyrics, which have to do chiefly with the diabolical pleasures of squeezing spoiled fat kids through giant tubes and turning gum-chewing brats into huge, floating blueberries.

And yet, even with all those good intentions -- and so many liberal dashes of inspired lunacy -- "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory" doesn't hang together as well as it should. The movie's opening scenes are in many ways the most engaging: That's when we meet young Charlie Bucket (Freddie Highmore, of "Finding Neverland," in a performance that's suitably earnest without ever lurching into cuteness), who lives in a small, rickety gray house with his mother and father (Helena Bonham Carter and Noah Taylor) and his four elderly grandparents, who spend nearly all of their time in bed. There's never enough to eat in the Bucket household -- the family subsists on nothing but cabbage soup, which is all Mr. Bucket, who works in a toothpaste factory screwing caps on tubes, can afford. But this is a home where everyone genuinely cares for one another, and young Charlie is particularly close to his Grandpa Joe (the wonderful Irish actor David Kelly), who regales young Charlie with stories of his days long ago as an employee of Willy Wonka, the owner of the most marvelous candy factory in the world, which happens to be located right near the Buckets' house.

But Wonka is a strange guy: Years ago, he was bitterly disappointed by employees who sold his secrets, and so he has closed his factory to the public -- no civilian has been inside it for years. Wonka has announced, though, that he will give away five golden tickets, wrapped randomly in his signature chocolate bars. The recipients of these tickets will be given a tour of the factory and are also eligible for a special prize.

Charlie, who gets only one candy bar a year, for his birthday, has little hope of finding a ticket. But sure enough, through an almost magical turn of events, he gets one. And so this kind, unspoiled, well-mannered child arrives for his day at the factory with the other winners and their parents; his Grandpa Joe accompanies him.

The other kids, as anyone who has read Dahl's books or has seen the earlier movie knows, are hateful brats whose indulgent parents haven't done them any favors, and they meet nasty (although not deadly) fates at Wonka's hands. Wonka, as Depp plays him, is hardly the kind of guy you'd entrust your kids' welfare to: A potential sociopath in a velvet coat and bright purple latex gloves, he speaks in a sugary, clipped, robotic singsong; his skin has a greenish-gray cast; and his eyes, beneath his Prince Valiant haircut, twinkle with demonic blankness.

Depp's Wonka is scary as heck, but not necessarily because he seems like a child molester. Some critics and smartypants onlookers have noted that the character bears a creepy and unfortunate resemblance to Michael Jackson, but to me, he's much more like Phil Spector, a wacko soft-spoken prince who spends his days pacing his prisonlike palace. Depp's performance isn't bad; it's just so carefully pruned, like a sharply tailored topiary bush, that it feels more like character design than a performance. When he fixes his glazed stare on the little tykes he's squiring around his vast, psychedelic-colored factory and observes, "You're all quite short, aren't you?" it's enough to coax a shuddering laugh out of you. But past a certain point, the performance feels like shtick, a tired riff on one uncomplicated idea. We don't necessarily have to like Willy Wonka, but should just looking at him give us a headache?

Burton has fleshed out Dahl's story to some degree, giving us more information about Wonka's background than we perhaps care to know (he has some daddy issues, and you would, too, if your father was a dentist played by the marvelously authoritarian Christopher Lee). And while the candy factory is something of a visual marvel -- including a landscape of mushroomy-looking gumdrop trees and a shiny fuchsia Viking ship with a curvy seahorse at the prow -- the opening and closing sections of "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory" are the ones that work best. In other words, the scenes that take place in the impoverished Bucket household are more effective, emotionally, than anything else in the movie. With a few notable exceptions ("Pee Wee's Big Adventure" among them), Burton is better with the infinitely variegated palette of grays than he is with candy colors -- bright colors don't seem to fire his imagination as much as dark ones do.

But maybe the myriad flaws of "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory" are simply the downside of genius. There are sequences in "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory" that are as nutcase-dazzling as anything Burton has ever attempted. Burton tells the back story of how Wonka recruited the Oompa Loompa tribe, from Oompa Loompa land, to work in his factory. (The Oompa Loompas are all played by one actor, the marvelously expressive Deep Roy.) In a sequence straight out of a Bob Hope/Bring Crosby "Road" movie -- with all the now-forbidden political incorrectness that implies -- Burton shows us Wonka communicating with the Oompa Loompa leader, in a combination of meaningful grunts and improvised sign language. The movie's ambitious production numbers, featuring jillions of computer-generated Oompa Loompas, are clear, affectionate homages to Busby Berkeley (as well as the aforementioned Esther Williams).

And then there are those squirrels, with their alert ears and fluffed-out tails. The reality is that not all of these nut-inspecting prodigies are real, live squirrels. According to the movie's press notes, Burton had his heart set on using live squirrels for the scene, but squirrels, though smart, are independent-minded little buggers and difficult to train. (In addition to the fact that their physiology prevents them from tossing nuts, or anything else for that matter, over their little shoulders.) So Burton had to settle for an artfully filmed combination of real squirrels and computer-generated and animatronic ones. You can kind of tell the difference, but it doesn't much matter. As jaggedly problematic as it is, "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory" couldn't have emerged from anywhere but the dark, chambered nautilus of Burton's imagination -- in its best sections, it's magically deranged in a way no other filmmaker could even come close to pulling off. The candyman can.