Starring Elle Fanning and Nathan Lane. Rated G.

This spectacle from veteran director Andrei Konchalovsky starts innocently, with 1920s Vienna (actually Hungary) a winter wonderland of lights, skating plazas, and happy burghers. This capital of anti-Semitism has been pleasantly reinvented as a place where Albert Einstein can be part of an aristocratic Austro-Hungarian family that has Gustav Klimt paintings on its walls. Said clan is led by a stuffed shirt and a flaky opera singer (Richard E. Grant and a badly dubbed Yuliya Vysotskaya, the Russian director’s wife).

Their children are soulful Mary and troublemaking Max (Elle Fanning and Aaron Michael Drozin), who let their imaginations fly around Uncle Albert, played by Nathan Lane—the only actor sporting a Germanic accent. For Christmas, the bushy-haired scientist brings them a giant dollhouse and a wooden soldier-cum-nutcracker. The nutcracker soon comes to life and veers between being voiced, as a puppet, by Shirley Henderson and embodied by real boy Charlie Rowe.

The nutcracker is actually an exiled prince under a magic spell, and you can accept this Nutcracker as an effects-laden fantasy for small children—initially. But then, suddenly, John Turturro shows up as the Rat King, a dictator who seems to be equal parts Andy Warhol and Adolf Hitler. Reversing Nazi propaganda, rats now run things in the prince’s benighted city, while “pure” people are enslaved. All children are expected to sacrifice their toys to a giant crematorium so the vermin can live in perpetually clouded skies.

Thus a tale about holiday ornaments come to life is subsumed by images of grey-helmeted rats surrounding the stacked corpses of baby dolls and teddy bears. Well, with fairy tales like this, who needs Schindler’s List? Sometimes, 3-D is not your family’s friend. There are a few snippets of Tchaikovsky, of course, modernized with dumb lyrics. The other songs are by Tim Rice, and they possess a different kind of horror.