Took off early to go see Charlie and the Chocolate Factory with my daughter.  My expectations are usually low (and rarely inaccurate) for Tim Burton movies, so I can’t say I was terribly disappointed.  But it was nevertheless far less satisfying than the Gene Wilder version or just reading the book.  The problem is that while Mr. Burton has a large imagination, he has a much smaller sense of finesse, so by the time I’m halfway through any of his movies I’m just tired of the whole thing.  I’m always thinking "what’s Burton going to do next?" instead of "what’s Charlie going to do next?"  The style overwhelms the story.  And it’s not just an excess of style (I loved A Series of Unfortunate Events), but style that doesn’t seem to be in the best service of the movie.

For instance, the songs are so overproduced even the characters end up commenting on their lack of spontaneity, a far cry from the simple outbreaks of rhyme Roald Dahl uses to summarize the moral.  The voices are so processed that you can’t understand a single word anyway, and the choreography is like a mixture of a surf movie and the Gong show.  The Oompa-loompas are all played by a single actor, multiplied through CG and compositing into dozens of dancing little clones.  Whenever these little guys are on the screen, the cloning is so overdone (eventually devolving to sight gags) that it totally obliterates any immersion in the story.

And what’s with Johnny Depp?  He looked and acted like Michael Jackson, and the parallels between Wonkaland and Neverland are difficult not to infer.  There’s a way to endear your character to the audience (not!)  I would have wanted to shout "run children run!" if I was immersed in the story to any meaningful degree.

I definitely plan to stay away from the Corpse Bride (Mr. Burton’s next release, which looks to have about as much subtlety as Lemony Snickett has happy endings) in favor of Wallace and Grommit’s The Curse of the Were-Rabbit (I already watched the trailer several times ;-).

[Update 2005-08-10: some sort of clever access control seemed to be preventing the display of the images linked from imdb.com.  So I copied them instead, and added links back to imdb.com.  Corrected some other links too.]