Tim Burton’s visual flair is on full display in ‘Miss Peregrine’

Much of the $110-million budget for Tim Burton’s “Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children” went into making a fantastical world seem realistic.

Based on a series of quirky young adult novels, “Peregrine” posits a fanciful world in which certain people have special and somewhat odd powers. One boy is invisible, another can bring inanimate things to life, and yet another has bees living inside him.

As for some of the girls, one can float into the air like a balloon, one is a fire-starter, and the smallest has super-strength.

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Because of these unusual powers, they’ve been persecuted throughout the ages and have had to hide away for their own protection.

“Because our abilities don’t fit in the outside world…” as Miss Peregrine explains.

Miss Peregrine is one of these special people — she can turn herself into a falcon — and she runs a kind of boarding school for a dozen or so of these peculiar children.

Peregrine’s greatest power is that she can create a time loop. This loop is a form of time travel in which she and her charges can live forever as long as they relive the same day and date over and over and over. They just have to remember to stop time at the same time each night for their lives to continue.

This is pure Tim Burton territory. He has always reveled in the weird and the extraordinary. His “Edward Scissorhands,” for instance, would fit right in with Miss Peregrine’s brood.

And Burton’s visual flair is on full display — the Victorian castle/home off the coast of Wales where the children live, the life-size animal topiary in the gardens, the miraculously preserved sunken ship at the bottom of the ocean. It’s a magical world many children would no doubt love to inhabit.

But this idyllic world is threatened by evil forces who want to seek and destroy the peculiars. And this is where the film falters. The backstory for these evil creatures is so elaborate and downright confusing. It has something to do with eating the eyeballs of the peculiars in a quest for eternal life, and the battles these spirits have with the peculiars are so frantic and arbitrary that the movie’s magic seems to peter out into something almost mundane.

The playground of peculiars that Burton so meticulously constructs deserves more inspired play. Here’s hoping that in a sequel — since this is based on a series of novels, I assume there will be sequels — Burton finds a story worthy of its setting.