This animated compendium of legends attached to Mexico’s Day of the Dead festival, produced by Guillermo del Toro for rookie director Jorge Gutierrez, sports gorgeous, marionette-inspired character design – mucho love has gone into the matadors’ bespoke jackets – and a palette so warm you feel yourself developing tanlines around your 3D specs. Elsewhere, its enthusiasm proves double-edged. So much diversion is crammed into these 95 minutes – charging bulls, cute piglets, stereoscopic maze-running, Latin-tinged covers of Radiohead and the Mumfords – that the central love triangle can scarcely take hold. The air of breathless romanticism is far from unappealing, but it generates something of a data dump: you sense mainstream animation will emerge from its rut only when it calms down long enough to appreciate the wonders it is engineering.
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