If you're lucky enough to go inside Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory, you’ll find delicious chocolate everywhere, including a vast chocolate river and an amazing chocolate waterfall. “It’s the only factory that uses a waterfall to mix the chocolate,” Willy proudly explains, twice. “That’s what makes it so light and frothy.”

Thanks to the creativity of filmmaker Tim Burton and actor Johnny Depp, Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory comes to glorious life on the big screen in this incredibly fascinating movie which is, as everyone knows, the second version of the classic children’s story. However, despite its dazzling sets, Burton's film does not feature a “light and frothy” look at the quirky candy man. Instead, more true to Dahl’s original vision, it gives viewers a much darker Willy Wonka than the one portrayed by Gene Wilder. It also demonstrates more dramatically this serious warning to children: Don’t be a spoiled brat or something horrible will happen to you.     

Burton and his crew let their imaginations run wild in the building of a colorful world inside Wonka’s Chocolate Factory. When we first see it, we’re reminded of Dorothy telling Toto “We’re not in Kansas anymore.” The dramatic impact of this scene is probably enhanced because it comes right after some dismal, Dickensian sequences involving poor little Charlie (Freddie Highmore, simply wonderful in this key role) and his family, who all live together in a tiny crooked house near the Factory.   

Charlie is one of five children who have found Golden Tickets in a Wonka Bar, which entitles them to be the first people to visit Wonka’s Chocolate Factory since it reopened a few years before. The reclusive Willy (and, in this version, we find out why he’s so distant and quirky) informs “the people of the world” that one of the children will win a very special prize.

I’ve saved the best for last -- and that’s Depp’s weird performance. Weird, oh yes, but nothing short of brilliant. Using The Wizard of Oz reference again, this Willy Wonka is both the Good Witch of the North and the Wicked Witch of the West, with a bit of Frank Morgan’s Wizard thrown in for good measure. He smiles beguilingly, frowns at certain questions, gets jiggy with the Munchkin-like Oompa-Loompas, and tells one of the children he dislikes to “stop mumbling” -- even though the boy speaks quite clearly. With his powdered face and page-boy hairdo, he looks like a  bizarre combination of Edward Scissorhands and Mamie Eisenhower. Depp’s perfect comic timing and nuanced vocal inflections also add to his unique interpretation of this fantastic character -- and he uses both superbly when delivering such silly lines as, “Little girl, don’t touch that squirrel’s nuts.”

Believe me, folks, this is one for the ages -- and for all ages.

(Released by Warner Bros. and rated “PG” for quirky situations, action and mild language.)