Jacob is sixteen years old, a distracted mother and a pragmatic father. Shy and awkward grew up with his grandfather, Abraham Portman, escaped Nazi persecution and sheltered in an orphanage directed by Miss Peregrine. Of that childhood, spending on an island off the coast of Wales, Abraham tells captivating wonders Jacob and capturing the peculiar nature. Because Jacob, just like his grandfather, is a special boy who discovers his vocation in dramatic circumstances. On the death of his grandfather, killed by his worst nightmare, Jacob decided to leave Florida for Wales, looking for anything that might explain his last wishes. Stranded on the island, soon he discovers that Miss Peregrine was not an invention of a senile mind, but a young woman who takes care of children with special gifts. Gifts greedy monsters and voracious would like to own. Protected by a time loop, Jacob and Co. respond to the threat.
Invisible or lighter than air, with a gigantic force or a voracious mouth, full of fire or bees, the literary boys Ransom Riggs Tim Burton to provide the ideal subject. Transposition of the novel, Miss Peregrine – The House of Special teens lives a world of eternal childhood, crowded with sensitive and lunar kids who would like invisible monsters devouring eyes. Burton made a movie inspired and personal, going up the time with his protagonist and fishing again heroes out of the ordinary and hatched to life by enlightened adults. Old fools, immortal mentors, mythomaniacs fathers, grandparents storyteller telling a dream life. But then dreamed it really? Played by Terence Stamp, who like Vincent Price, Martin Landau and Albert Finney is an actor of prestige and bearer of a cinematic imagery phantasmagoric, Abraham Portman feeds the imagination of his nephew leaving out the different poetry. And Jacob grows different, full of the one light that we can hope to receive, the glow of wonder and the will to believe.
Jacob, in the manner of Alice, is curious since the threshold for this is precipitated in a time loop where it is no longer to rewind time to change an event and escape the consequences. In this round of ring acts against someone or something that comes from outside. special effect load of special affections, the loop is the secret gift of Miss Peregrine, the perpetuity period in which hides his children and through explaining the story of Burton, moving from our age to another (located in one day precisely in 1943). A fable that averts the historical pessimism and swears that history never repeats itself equal to itself, an adventure that bends time to transform and multiply the results. In Miss Peregrine – The house of special guys the loop is opened a passage in the linearity of time in which they try to slip unseen evil forces and greedy of eternal life that derive their power from a singular diet: children’s eyes.
Recurring theme in the cinema (Hitchcock, Buñuel, Pasolini), eye mutilation is a direct attack on the viewer, to his nature, to the job and demands spalancatamente eyes open on the screen. Burton takes childhood anguish of losing his eyes and as in a tale of Hoffmann ( “The Sandman”) it enacts the trauma, converting the brutal denial of poetic creation in vision. A final battle between kind and giant tentacled monsters, pelted with snowballs, confetti and candy floss, which finally makes it visible to the world the bad guys. Bad carnivores and eyeless, invisible to everyone except Jacob and Abraham, special guy between special guys promised to death during World War II. But Burton’s film is not the watered-down metaphor of that war and its Holocaust. The boys of the title, invisible light, ‘hungry’, flammable, Herculean, living a parallel time still accessible from the monsters, who stopped the uniforms and disguised the ferocity behind the willingness to countenance change. Miss Peregrine – The house of special children, Burton finds the art of childhood journey, directing a clash between skeletons with heart and heartless creatures that pays homage to Ray Harryhausen, the master of special effects à l’ancienne.
The author’s craft and poetic imagination takes breath and draw a new hero traveling in a narrative device, allowing Jacob to discover himself and the gift that ignored and echoed endlessly the same threat (a Nazi bomb or a hollow hungry), stopping it when the worst is coming. Tank of his obsessions, the orphanage of Miss Peregrine is a refuge, a space in which to condense his style, an expressionist museum where every child draws and marginal replica of his filmography. And again allowed access.