1 out of 5

Director: Luc Besson

Oof.  I watch a fair share of cartoons, and I get that kids don’t need a lot of justification to get from point A to point B.  I was interested to watch this to see what Besson had been up to besides producing and writing, and I end up agreeing with one of the quoted critcisms of this movie (from “Variety,” according to wiki) – Besson admitted to knowing nothing about animation and this shows.  If you ever have any doubt about the “direction” of animated flicks, this is a good example of how not to do it – it FLIES through it’s pretty detail laden treasure-hunting plot, jumping right into story and characters without a thought for pacing, action and drama just a blitz of words and sound clumsily story-boarded in a scopeless, point-here look-there way.  The story is normal enough kid fare – lost family member (a grandfather in this case), a fairy tale that ends up being true (a world of tiny peoples), lead kid saves the day by believing in the fairy tale (Arthur travels to the mini world to rescue gramps).  There are some chuckles in the dialogue and the fish-out-of-water humor, but they follow that same trend of being too sloppily included to work, and the animation style has a weird modern / dated feel to it.  Just a herky jerky work all around that doesn’t connect on a story or visual level.  Kids not old enough to care will probably be entertained by some it, but even the design is sort of a middleground of other movies, and doesn’t have an identifiably “cute” or “goofy” or “heroic” character to side with and make action figures for.  Kids old enough to care are watching porn, so that’s that.