A Mexican legend about a bet between the gentle Muerte and the Machiavellian Xibalba, queen and king of the lands of the dead, over the love of two young men for the same girl in the village of San Angel. Joaquin, the son of a heroic soldier, follows in his father’s footsteps thanks to a magic amulet he secretly gets from Xibalba. Manolo, meanwhile, is destined to become a toreador, but dreams of making music. When he is bitten by a snake, Manolo is transported into another world, where he must face his greatest fears to win the heart of Maria and conquer the enemies of the village…

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To put it bluntly,The Book of Life is an overblown animated film that is too heavy and too dumb to watch. Built around the well-meaning objective of imparting Mexican culture through the Day of the Dead, this movie, directed by Jorge R. Gutierrez and produced by Guillermo Del Toro, desperately lacks ideas, humor and energy. Deathly boring, this weak story about a love triangle and a supernatural wager, embellished with a battle against a local enemy, rushes blindly into every pitfall of the genre. Even an excursion into the land of the dead doesn’t add interest to the story, which resembles a cheap fairy tale with neither vitality nor ambition – the obvious but failed attempt to not make Maria a pitiful damsel in distress confirms the mediocrity of the whole enterprise. The icing on this inedible cake: despite the collaboration of the maker of Pan’s Labyrinth, there is no magic at all in The Book of Life.