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| Movies,
Jerry Carpenter,
20 January 1999 |
Rating: F5
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This adaptation gave me the richter-scale shudders when I first came across it. I’d been working on some internet focused marketing for it (some jerky cartoon mail-a-rounds), and we’d been sent a fist full of press shots and copy to tiddle with. To reinterpret poet laureate and wife-whacker Ted Hughes’s grim but powerful children’s story as an Americanized Disneyesque boy-and-his-giant-robot tale seemed like a recipe for doom. Plus they’d removed the original ending with the robot getting one over the Space-bat-angel-dragon but making him wrap himself around the sun. Ask anyone who remembers the story and they’ll tell you that’s the best bit.
But then film hit the US and the reviews were stunning. It wasn’t cheesy and sentimental. It had no crappy songs in it. It was directed by a ‘Simpsons’ regular. It was the best film Jennifer Anniston had ‘starred’ in to date. It bombed.
So now it’s out here, hoping to pan-handle a little loose change off post-school holiday kids, shoved into matinee slots in the handful of cinemas that couldn’t get ‘Inspector Gadget’. My first impression is that it looks beautiful, the line-work is not unusually colourful – giving every frame a paintily glowing look. The lighting work is great too, and the way they’ve melded CGI and tradition drawing style for the robot makes all the scenes with him in a right old treat to watch.
Storywise, there’s nothing too out of the ordinary here – it’s your usual boy meet giant robot thing, pressed from the ‘E.T.’ blueprint, with ubiquitous bad government type included. The fifties America setting seems less to add ‘reds-under-the-bed’ paranoia trappings than to give the film a stylish backdrop. There are a couple of scene where the robot gets the ‘you’re a person too’ thing from the kid, and some tasteful meditations on the nature of the soul – cool for the kids. But the whole ‘guns are bad’ thing get shafted by the coolest part of the movie where guns (and lasers and nukes) look really really cool.
But it’s a positive step forward – an animated film which compels from start to finish without a single song by Phil Collins, and not cute wise-cracking animal in sight. Sources tell me the only reason it stiffed at the BO was it’s poorly conceived marketing campaign. Whoops.
UK rating:
PG
US rating:
PG
Brad Bird 1999 USA
Jennifer Aniston, Christopher McDonald, Harry Connick Jr., Cloris Leachman and Vin Diesel
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