If swirls of gorgeous, gaudy color were all it took to animate an animated movie then “The Book of Life” — with its showy splashes of acid purples and greens, its tangerine-dream sunsets and big blue-gray moon — would be bursting with as much energy and life as a Warner Bros. cartoon classic. As it is, this often beautiful and too-often moribund, if exhaustingly frenetic, feature tends to be less energetic than the dead people waltzing through it.
It’s a drag how frequently the stories in feature animations get in the way of the visuals. Such is the case in “The Book of Life,” which opens with a handful of kids who, during a museum visit, are introduced by a guide (voiced by Christina Applegate) to the Book of Life. Once cracked open, this magical tome disgorges the rather less-enchanted story of three other tots: Manolo, the scion of a bullfighting family; Joaquin, the son of a heroic soldier; and Maria, whose father runs the Mexican-fantasy town of San Ángel. After some frolicsome, choreographed high jinks, Maria is sent away only to return as the base in a formulaic love triangle.
Clip: ‘The Book of Life’
A scene from the film.
Video by Reel FX/20th Century Fox on Publish Date October 15, 2014. Photo by Reel FX/Twentieth Century Fox.The director Jorge R. Gutierrez, who shares script credit with Doug Langdale, has a far stronger visual sensibility than story sense. “The Book of Life” instantly pulls you in with its eye-poking palette and amusingly exaggerated character designs that with a few touches, telegraph entire personalities, like the strange doll eye and floppy candy-colored mops of the museum kids. Both the colors and character designs morph once the scene shifts to Manolo, Joaquin and Maria (voiced by Diego Luna, Channing Tatum and Zoë Saldana) who, with their big block heads and articulated joints, have been wittily rendered to look somewhat like those flexible wooden figurines used by artists for anatomical studies. (Some townspeople look more like clothespins with Mr. Potato Head lips.)
Once Maria returns to San Ángel, her form has ballooned in all the familiar places, turning into a kind of walking, talking hourglass adorned with a luxurious cascade of hair. She’s a doll, or rather a tasty animated dish, one who, as the movie continues, is fought over by her two friends turned warring suitors. This romantic blather is both a bore and a clichéd encumbrance, and it pulls the movie down even when the animation lifts it up. The script chugs along, despite some scenes in the land of the dead; someone, however, does slip in a case for being nice to animals along with what seems like a nod to José Guadalupe Posada, the Mexican artist who made skulls grin and skeletons dance.
“The Book of Life” is rated PG (Parental guidance suggested). You see dead people.