The dead can dance in “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice.” They’re wobbling and dancing on a soul train to the afterlife, which is exactly what it sounds like, complete with afros and disco balls in a bustling Grand Central Station of the underworld. It’s one of dozens of delightful throwaway jokes in Tim Burton’s surprisingly snappy follow-up to his 1988 classic, a long-awaited film that I don’t think many people expected to be very good. What a relief to report that the return of Michael Keaton’s eponymous vaudeville ghoul is one of the more unexpected pleasures of this spooky season, a visually extravagant and blessedly inconsequential spectacle with a playful spirit we haven’t seen from the filmmaker in a while.

Burton’s empathy for outsiders and tacky flair for the macabre captivated filmgoers with a series of uniquely personal blockbusters that helped define suburban alienation in the ‘80s and ‘90s. But he’s wasted the better part of this century on pointless remakes, slapping his brand name on lumbering, ugly CGI spectacles like 2010’s “Alice in Wonderland” and 2019’s “Dumbo,” a strangely self-loathing cautionary tale about selling out to evil corporations that felt like a forlorn artist’s cry for help. I don’t often walk away from movies, but I bailed on Burton’s 2016 adaptation of “Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children” after 40 minutes because it felt like I’d been locked in a Hot Topic after the mall closed.

“Beetlejuice Beetlejuice” is a return to basics for the filmmaker, who reunites (most of) the cast from his sophomore effort and goes wild with the kind of zany, retro puppet humor and crude effects that defined Tim Burton films before they all started looking like digital goo. There’s a handmade quality to the visuals and effects in this film. Even the CGI stuff is designed to look practical, with slick computer animation given glitches and little judders to resemble traditional stop-motion. The film feels like it was created by someone, which is a rare thing to say about a blockbuster sequel these days. It’s also light on its feet, which is even rarer.

Winona Ryder returns as Lydia Deetz, the teenage ghost whisperer who’s now a middle-aged TV psychic with a resentful goth daughter of her own. Jenna Ortega brings her Wednesday Addams expression to the big screen as the brooding Astrid, who torments her mother the same way Lydia once tormented her quietly show-stealing stepmother, Delia (Catherine O’Hara). A family tragedy — which involves the funniest, most creative way I’ve ever seen to film a canceled actor — brings them all back to the old haunted house in Connecticut, where Keaton’s rogue demon Betelgeuse still longs for Ryder, who you may recall nearly forced to become his bride.

But it turns out old Beet has an ex-wife of her own, a literal soul-sucker played by Burton’s cartoonishly lustful real-life squee Monica Bellucci. An objectively hilarious role to give your girlfriend, she’s the dismembered leader of a hell-raising death cult who reassembles herself with a staple gun and sets out to find her former husband. I knew this was going to be something special when their backstory took the form of a black-and-white homage to horror filmmaker Mario Bava, complete with Keaton’s narration dubbed into Italian with English subtitles. Her case is investigated by an inspector from the afterlife (Willem Dafoe) who was once, on our plane of existence, a Method actor a little too caught up in his own stunts, and now plays his favorite cop role for eternity. It’s impossible to get tired of Dafoe calling Keaton’s character “Mr. Geuse.”

There’s plenty more, including Ryder’s slimy manager/boyfriend (Justin Theroux, somehow doing a little too much in a film that wallows in too much) and Ortega’s hipster love interest, who isn’t quite what he seems. There are probably at least two sequels’ worth of storylines crammed into Alfred Gough and Miles Millar’s ​​screenplay, but the film flies by in a fleeting 104 minutes. That’s at least a half hour shorter than most studio films make these days, and the brevity of “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice” is truly the soul of its humor.

The visual gags come at you fast and furiously, the image moving at the manic pace of Keaton’s motorized monologues. Burton crams every frame with gleefully gross things to look at, so your eyes don’t have time to take it all in. Extras in the afterlife bear their mortal wounds as they wander these bureaucratic waiting rooms and crooked, German Expressionist hallways, and I want to see the film again just to get a better look at the man who died in a hot dog eating contest or the charred sad sack in the Santa costume.

Ortega’s subplot bears a striking resemblance to a subplot from last spring’s “Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire,” and it’s telling to compare the two films. Both are unsolicited sequels to supernatural comedies from nearly four decades ago, but the bizarrely reverent new “Ghostbusters” films creak under the weight of their own lore, taking deadly seriously the sort of dumb plot details that “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice” uses as a limp clothesline on which to hang jokes. I can’t help but think that the scene in this photo of a mournful children’s choir singing “Banana Boat (Day-O)” at a funeral is a dig at how solemnly modern franchises take their fan service.

It’s the nature of Keaton’s chaos agent to constantly break the rules of whatever reality you think the film has created, so “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice” keeps throwing new inventions and crazy ideas at the wall. Not all of them stick, but they don’t all need to, and at such a frenetic pace. Keaton and Ryder are more energetic onscreen than they’ve been in a while, going all out for a gonzo climax musical number set to Richard Harris’ cover of “MacArthur Park.” (Don’t worry, the film makes room for the Donna Summer version, too. And yes, there’s even a cake in the rain.) It’s the kind of great nonsense set piece that has no reason to exist other than because it’s funny and because it could. The same goes for the film.

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“Beetlejuice Beetlejuice” is now in theaters.