Babble

Those seeking to traumatize young children need look no further than Eragon. The six-year-old seated beside me "watched" the bulk of this garish fantasy/adventure with the brim of his flannel cap shielding his eyes, desperately applying pressure to his earflaps. (Never would I have dreamed that anything could make me view the alternately shrill and insipid stars of PBS's animated Dragon Tales in a new, more positive light.) Saphira, the dragon attached to Eragon's titular hero, speaks in the dulcet tones of Rachel Weisz, but is otherwise so devoid of personality that I started rooting for Durza, the evil magician/Marilyn Manson lookalike, to zap her with one of his deadly black fingernails, thus releasing both me and the miserable child beside me from our individual torments.

Alas, the new cinematic paradigm mandates that a hundred million dollars worth of hollow special effects must be deployed before our hero and his computer-generated dragon can rescue the smirking princess from the clutches of King John Malkovich, mincing and snarling like a drama queen with an unwholesome attraction to hot wax. Apologies to H.R. Pufnstuf and his predecessor, Puff the Magic, but remember the good old days when the dragon was the bad guy? — Ayun Halliday

Watching Jim Carrey pilot How the Grinch Stole Christmas over the top and into the ground was heartbreaking. Compared to the muted glory that was the animated original, the remake was boring, too long and a perfect example of how good things can get lost under piles and piles of money. With that in mind, I was a virulent naysayer when I heard that Paramount was releasing a live action remake of Charlotte's Web. Don't get me wrong, I'm a fan of the franchise — I loved both the book and the original movie — but the sins of the Carrey made me reluctant. As I headed out to the screening, I was like a burned divorcee getting back into the dating scene.

But, a Christmas miracle, the movie isn't nearly the disaster I anticipated. It isn't excellent, but it's good like a house with a decent foundation is good. The CGI is realistic and there is a notable performance by Steve Buscemi as Templeton the rat, but the true strength remains E.B. White's writing. While he did write it for children, White made sure to use big words and even bigger themes — death, rebirth, classism. In fact, the worst part of the movie is when it chooses to not rely on the strength of the original words and instead on new, rapid-fire, "adult" dialogue, presumably tossed in to keep parents entertained. It comes off as easy and stupid. That aside, I actually enjoyed this movie — and, yes, cried like a baby at the end. — Cord Jefferson

The inaugural film from Sony Pictures' new animation division doesn't seem so much like a stand-alone film as it does a CGI-by-numbers, in which the points of previous successful children's films (ethnically stereotyped animals, check! A journey of friendship and self-discovery, check! Sloppily written ballads by a rock star of yesteryear — in this case, Paul Westerberg — check!) are thrown together with hope for similar success. Unfortunately, due to strikingly lackluster animation, an unfunny, uninspired script, and a second-tier cast of sitcom graduates, it fails to entertain, let alone reach the transcendent peaks of similar, earlier offerings. Or maybe we're just not so easily impressed anymore.

Part back-to-land manifesto, part potty-humored comedy, Open Season is the story of Boog (voiced by Martin Lawrence, the poor man's Eddie Murphy), a 900-lb. grizzly bear living comfortably in the garage of kindly forest ranger Beth (Debra Messing) until she reluctantly returns him to the wild. Her timing couldn't have been worse; the other animals refuse to accept the domesticated stranger in their midst, it's three days until the beginning of hunting season and psychotic hunter Shaw (Gary Sinise), a redneck who believes that the animal kingdom is dead set on nothing less than total domination of humans, is out for blood. Luckily, Boog has some help from one-horned buck Elliot (Ashton Kutcher), and eventually, the animals rise up in self-defense to take back the forest as their own.

The film has been criticized for its alleged anti-gun stance, and perhaps anticipating this, the filmmakers have inserted a few half-hearted swipes at boys who want to sing and dance and people who drink lattes. This appeasement did render one moment unintentionally hilarious, when a big, butch buck sneers at Boog: "I've heard of you. You're the bear who got thumped in the butt by squirrels." Boog's reply: "They had nuts!" — Rachel Shukert

I was never much of a horse girl; I somehow managed to skip that phase of female sexual development, advancing straight to human boys, and when I see an image of a young girl astride a glossy steed, cantering wildly through the mountains with the wind in her hair, I feel not a sense of exhilarating freedom, but rather think to myself: Shouldn't she be wearing some kind of helmet?

But despite these inauspicious qualifications, I thoroughly enjoyed the highly watchable Flicka. Based on Mary O'Hara's 1941 classic children's book My Friend Flicka, the story centers on sixteen-year-old Katy McLaughlin (Alison Lohman), a sensitive horse fanatic. Home from boarding school at her family's gorgeous (but struggling) Wyoming ranch, Katy is saved one morning from a mountain lion attack by a feral horse. It's love at first sight, but her overprotective rancher father (Tim McGraw, who for some reason was really doing it for me here) conspires to keep them apart, for reasons that are never quite clear. No matter. A loving rendering of the American West, complete with stunning vistas, wild mustangs, loving but emotionally unavailable fathers, and rodeo clowns, the film transcends its hokey plot and stilted dialogue ("We're the same, she and I," the main character states repeatedly, referring to the title equine) with sensitive performances, a sumptuous visual style half Brokeback Mountain, half Martha Stewart Living (and really, are the two so different?) and some surprisingly touching, if sentimental insights about the father-daughter relationship. A must-see for the budding equestrienne set. And if you're a grown-up and horses aren't your thing, you can always re-imagine the whole affair to amusing effect as a dark sexual metaphor. — Rachel Shukert

Conformity is bad, animated kidflicks repeatedly tell us. Be yourself; flaunt your individuality; Robert Frost took the road less traveled, and it led him to this really hot cocktail waitress whose husband conveniently worked the graveyard shift. A worthy message, perhaps, but rather hard to take seriously when espoused by the most rigidly codified genre in Hollywood. Waddling in the beloved footsteps of March of the Penguins, Happy Feet lugs the Dumbo template all the way to Antarctica, where one newborn chick, Mumble (eventually voiced by Elijah Wood), can't seem to locate his "heartsong," defined here as a musty pop standard that one warbles, karaoke-like, at the object of his/her affection.Instead, Mumble likes to tap dance, and that means that he must leave Japan -- sorry, his own flock -- and seek acceptance from fellow stubborn misfits. Happy Feet's notion of unorthodoxy, I'm frightened to report, involves Robin Williams as a cholo-accented penguin from the other side of the 'berg.

There was good reason to hope that this paint-by-numbers effort might occasionally wander outside the digital lines, since it's the brainchild of George Miller, whose Babe: Pig in the City ranks among the most demented talking-animal pictures ever made. Apart from a thrillingly kinetic leopard seal attack and a kooky climactic plea for environmental ethics, however, originality and imagination are in dispiritingly short supply. Sadly, animated features don't even offer the pleasure of distinctive voice work anymore -- Hugh Jackman and Nicole Kidman (equally forgettable as Mumble's parents) provide a much better photo-op at the premiere. Still, you can always amuse yourself trying to figure out whether it ever occurred to Miller, or anybody else at Warner Bros., that the sight of a bird with different-colored feathers tapping and grinning his way into people's hearts might have some unfortunate associations. Happy feets, do yo' stuff. -- Mike D'Angelo