Starring Joseph Kaiser and Amy Carson. Rated G.

Kenneth Branagh has discovered opera and CGI at the same time, and the result, unfortunately, is not very pretty.

The man who so successfully brought Shakespeare to the big screen here tries to turn his talents to Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's light-as-air singspiel The Magic Flute. The sheer audacity is awe-inducing, but that's the best that even diehard opera fans are going to be able to say about this kitschy catastrophe (finished in 2006 but only now hitting Vancouver).

The opening is an over-the-top, CGI–cranked take swooping from the trenches of a battlefield, up with a butterfly over verdant meadows, and then down to the frontline, where Tamino (Canadian tenor Joseph Kaiser) is about to charge into bullets and barbed wire. And there you have it: Mozart's magical-kingdom fairy tale set against the grimmest of all possible settings, the trench warfare of World War I.

Stephen Fry's libretto sets up a scenario in which a wounded Tamino awakens in a sort of First World War dreamland. There he sets out to rescue the princess Pamina (Amy Carson) from the supposedly evil Sarastro (commanding bass-baritone René Pape). What you end up with is a bizarre mix of heavy antiwar messaging and campy cartoon flourishes.

Among the “What the”¦?” moments is the Queen of the Night (ferocious standout Lyubov Petrova) singing Mozart's famously acrobatic “rage aria” and then suddenly zipping around in the air like a rocket-fuelled Woody Woodpecker, apparently propelled by her own high Cs and Fs.

Branagh is so busy amping up his Flute with clever, overpolished visual tricks that he fails to show the work's humanity or relevance—elements that helped make his Hamlet and Henry V accessible. The director may have brought legions of new fans to the Bard, but opera companies may want to start praying this is a passing fancy.