Animals United
Director: Reinhard Klooss, Holger Tappe
Starring: James Corden, Jim Broadbent, Dawn French
The best children's cartoons, and certainly the best Disney cartoons, are always a bit, well, lessony. From Lady and the Tramp to Beauty and the Beast (both "don't judge a book by its cover" classics) right up to Wall-E ("don't over-eat"), there is always a kernel of righteousness hidden within the thundering narrative and colourful pizzazz. With the German-made 3D cartoon Animals United, however, the process is turned entirely inside out. Here, the movie has become the lesson, and hidden within it somewhere are the scrappy remnants of narrative and character. Thus we are presented with an anonymous central-African every-country, where a group of wise-cracking animals (is there any other kind?), including a lion (Stephen Fry), a meerkat (James Corden) and a Galapagos turtle (Vanessa Redgrave) must band together (see title) to stop the development of an evil life-sapping river dam and teach the pernicious species called "man" about the balance of nature. There really is nothing going on here, other than the idea that children need to learn that man destroys the environment (early, first-act sequences include a drunken tanker pilot and a bushfire-starting dolt). The kids, you suspect, will have already got the message by the end of these heavy-handed scenes. The rest is just a chore.
