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Movies & TV Movies & TV Reviews

The Book Of Life

THE BOOK OF LIFE (Jorge R. Gutierrez). 95 minutes. Opens Friday (October 17). For venues and times see Movies. Rating: NNN


The Book Of Life offers an embarrassment of riches. It’s a bursting-at-the-seams piñata of an animated movie, stuffed with so many glorious visuals, delightful gags and candy-wrapped life and death lessons that it implodes before anyone can savour how sweet a treat it is.

The phantasmagoric folktale revolves around Mexico’s Día de los Muertos (Day of the Dead), but parents shouldn’t be too concerned about the morbid fascination factor. The deceased here are bright, cheery and colourful, like skeletons dressed for Carnival.

The film centres on a love triangle between best friends (voiced by Diego Luna, Zoe Saldana and Channing Tatum) who become gambling fodder for afterlife gatekeepers La Muerte (Kate del Castillo) and Xibalba (Ron Perlman). The Mexican love affair turns into a skull-spinning, labyrinthine adventure that encompasses the past and present and the lands of the living, remembered and forgotten.

Producer Guillermo del Toro and director Jorge Gutierrez have said that an early version of the film clocked in at close to three hours, something I imagine as an epic that could have qualified as animation’s answer to Milton’s Paradise Lost. This bare-bones version is a busy, overpopulated mess, where no individual character gets enough time to sustain our interest.

But what a magnificent mess it is. Every intricate frame is nuanced and dazzling, the kind of animation that deserves a place in the land of the remembered.

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