Tim Burton's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is a delicious, colorful, twisted piece of eye-candy, and a feast of brilliant, delightful characters who will be savored forever like a Willy Wonka Everlasting Gobstopper.

For the first time in recent memory, Johnny Depp is not the main reason to see a film in which he performs. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory features such a perfectly cast ensemble of adult and child actors that even a star of Depp's charisma and eccentricity doesn't come close to outshining them.

For the few readers who are unfamiliar with the story, it concerns a reclusive and magically inventive chocolatier named Willy Wonka, who offers the five winners of a contest an opportunity for a once-in-a-lifetime tour of his Factory. Five golden tickets are hidden in Wonka Bars and shipped all over the world, where they are discovered by four exceedingly obnoxious children, and one uncommonly good little boy. What follows is a tale of bizarre fantasy and wickedly just desserts.

In portraying the characters in Charlie, Burton has skipped across time to dress his his characters in the trappings of the eras that suit them. The kind-hearted but poverty stricken Charlie Bucket is a character straight out of Charles Dickens; the piggish Augustus Gloop would be at home in a fairy tale by the Brothers Grimm; Veruca Salt is a spoiled child from a wealthy, mid-twentieth century industrialist family; Violet Beauregarde is pure Reagan Era, 1980's 'me generation,' while Mike Teavee is a child of today, obsessed with video games and precociously logical. Willy Wonka himself is inexplicably presented as an Edwardian-dressed dandy of the 1960's, spouting expressions like 'let's boogie,' although nothing in his flash-backed childhood presages it.

The parents and families of the children are also exceptionally cast, particularly Noah Taylor and David Kelly, as Father and Grandfather Bucket, and Missi Pyle as Mrs. Beauregarde, heretofore seen in Burton's Big Fish as Mildred, and as the quirky alien girl in Galaxy Quest.

Tim Burton has always reveled in playing dark against bright. His visual esthetic finds comfort in misty grays and embracing shadows, while having a childlike delight in garishly intense colors. His new film offers perfect tableaus in which to use his full palette. The depictions of the London in which both Charlie and Willy Wonka live are perfectly rendered in muted tones, all the more effective as prelude to the electric kool-aid acid trip that is the world of the Chocolate Factory.

Adding to the hallucinatory effect of Tim Burton's vision is his choice to portray the diminutive Oompa-Loompas as an homage to the specatacle of Bollywood musicals from India.

Much of Roald's Dahl's original story is faithfully captured here, including the sarcastic banter between the bratty kids and Willy Wonka, although perhaps no film could capture the non-stop inventiveness and wonderful wordplay of the book, which is rightfully a classic. To his credit, Burton has used Roald Dahl's own lyrics for the taunting songs of the Oompas that punctuate each of the children's misfortunes.

Here is a sample Dahl's lyrics, as chanted by the Oompa-Loompas.

Augustus Gloop! Augustus Gloop!
The big, greedy nincompoop!
How long could we allow this beast
to gorge and guzzle, feed and feast?

"Come on," we cried, "The time is ripe
To send him shooting up the pipe!

But don't dear children be alarmed,
Augustus Gloop will not be harmed,
Although of course we must admit
He will be altered quite a bit ...

He'll be quite changed from what he's been,
When he goes through the fudge machine:
Slowly the wheels go round and round,
The cogs begin to grind and pound;

A hundred knives to slice slice slice;
We add some sugar, cream and spice;
We boil him for a minute more
Until we're absolutely sure

That all the greed and all the gall
Is boiled away for once and all.
Then out he comes! And now! By grace!
A miracle has taken place!

This boy who only just before
Was loathed by men from shore to shore,
This greedy brute, this louses ear,
Is loved by people everywhere!

For who could hate or bear a grudge
Against a luscious bit of fudge?

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And oh yes, there is Johnny Depp. The actor's uninhibited playfulness and seldom-seen gift for slapstick is especially entertaining for children, while Willy Wonka's sadistic way of dispensing juvenile justice will forever please their elders, for whom this fantasy is truly intended.