The venturesome New Victory Theater prides itself on not talking down to children (its chief constituency), and rightly so. Still, I had my doubts that the younger members of the 12-and-up crowd would warm to an all-marionette version of “MacBeth,” a co-presentation of the 250-year-old Milanese marionette theater Compagnia Carlo Colla e Figli and the Chicago Shakespeare Theater.

Those doubts were banished in the first few minutes of this striking production, which lifts Shakespeare’s disquieting tale of ambition and murder and sets it down inside the walls of a marionette theater. The proscenium functions like the hardcover of a storybook: Inside its margins, an illustrated tale transpires. (One quickly forgets the microphone-equipped actors who sit in the narrow space where the orchestra pit would be.)

There is nothing especially lifelike about the way the marionettes move. They bounce when they walk, their mouths don’t synch up precisely with their words, and they seem to gesticulate an awful lot. In this “MacBeth,” the puppets are not human substitutes. They are dolls — strange and unnatural, yet compelling.

The marionettes appear in a series of breathtaking storybook tableaux (by the Colla company’s design team), environments flawlessly designed and executed. But this is a landscape out of Grimm, not Disney. There is a German storybook forest, a witches’ cave, a mesmerizing flock of birds, and a series of stone castle interiors whose windows glow with eerie night skies. (The lighting, by Franco Citterio, is pure old-fashioned theatrical pleasure.)

Many of the sets have extraordinary depth of field, with the puppets staggered throughout the space to create an effect similar to looking through an old View-master. This dimensionality is put to elegant use in a scene in which Banquo, standing in the foreground, watches Macbeth’s coronation unfold in the distance, through an open archway, and gives his wary Act III soliloquy.

Elaborate as the sets may be, the set changes are seamless, requiring only a few seconds of darkness underscored by Fabio Vecchi’s portentous orchestral music — all screechy strings and warning woodwinds.

Equally musical are the voices of the actors from the Chicago Shakespeare Theater (under the direction of Kate Buckley). The play is considerably abridged, but it is still in Shakespeare’s language, and by uttering the lines with strong hints of emotional direction, they allow children to get the gist of the action, even if they don’t get the specifics.

Naturally, something is lost by making these all-too-human characters wooden. The adults may be excused for longing to see the play’s raw emotions register on the faces and bodies of a live Macbeth and his lady. The king’s offstage murder and the sleepwalking scene are especially impoverished by the marionettes’ limited range. Yet the dramatic impact can still be strong, especially when daggers are raised onstage.

As Macbeth, Jim Mezon does a commendable job of separating the lines into discernible thoughts and ideas. His line readings are in no small part responsible for the satisfying way that Macbeth evolves over the production’s 90 minutes.

Highest honors, however, go to the marionette theater’s director, Eugenio Monti Colla, and to Carlo Colla III, who is credited with staging. Their use of the tools of their trade — from sets to lighting to costumes to manipulation of those strings — creates a storybook visual and emotional experience that hearkens back to an earlier class of entertainments. At times cinematic, at times operatic, their touch is potent enough to command the eye and light enough to avoid any hint of melodramatic foolishness.

“MacBeth” remains a curious choice of subject for a puppet theater. It is not enough of a fable to be satisfyingly told in pictorial style — one longs for a human nuance that these particular puppets are not capable of articulating. It is also an unlikely choice of play for children, with its ribald jester, its serial violence, and its floods of blank verse.

Yet the strangeness of this “MacBeth” is part of its unexpected appeal, for children and adults alike. There are limits to these marionettes’ powers of expression, but to turn the storybook pages of this savage tale is to feel the pleasure of a scary bedtime story — at any age.

Until April 29 (209 W. 42nd St. at Seventh Avenue, 212-239-6200).