‘Peregrine’ fits Burton’s oddball sensibility

Story lends itself to filmmaker’s brand of moviemaking.

Style, for Tim Burton, isn’t a substitute for good storytelling, but an essential means of delivering it. And so with “Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children” — an engagingly oddball adaptation of Ransom Riggs’s 2011 best-seller about youngsters with X-Men-like powers who come under attack by malevolent entities — the opportunities for the “Alice in Wonderland” filmmaker to flex his particular brand of moviemaking muscle are manifold.

In a story involving time travel, scary monsters and a group of qui rk i ly c har i s mati c Engl i sh orphans blessed (or cursed) with such fantastical gifts as one boy’s ability to control the colony of bees that live in his stomach, Burton is in his element. If any of these strange children are standins for the director himself, it is Horace (Hayden Keeler-Stone), a dapper tyke who pops a special lens in front of his eyeball, like a jeweler’s loupe, and proceeds to project his dreams onto the wall for the delectation of his friends.

In the case of “Miss Peregrine” — a story that echoes Burton’s affinity for the grotesque, even the macabre — those dreams are more like nightmares.

Burton’s emphasis on visuals makes sense. Riggs’s book evolved

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