For nearly 50 years, in various incarnations on the small
screen and in other forms of media, lively chipmunks Alvin, Simon and Theodore have
been delighting young audiences around the world, wreaking havoc upon the house
and possessions of their caretaker, Dave Seville, and crooning in distinctively
high-pitched, three-part harmonies. From the moment they sprung into being, the
creative brainchild of singer/songwriter Ross Bagdasarian, Sr., the chipmunks’
catchy sound has been a strange yet consistent pop cultural mainstay. Now, a
colorful but uninspired CGI/live-action hybrid film of the same name seeks to capitalize
on that dormant franchise power.

After the tree that is their home gets cut down for a
Christmas decoration, three chipmunks — rascally, impetuous Alvin, bespectacled voice-of-conscience
Simon and tubby, friendly Theodore — take up residence with frustrated, aspirant
songwriter Dave Seville (Jason Lee). Dave’s life is a wreck; his girlfriend
Claire (Cameron Richardson) recently left him, and he’s struggling to come up
with a hit for his demanding agent, Ian (David Cross).

At first thrown for a loop when he finds the trio in his
house, Dave catches the chipmunks and tosses them out. He changes his tune,
however, when he discovers that Alvin and the gang can carry a tune of their
own, so he strikes a professional deal with them: he’ll write the music, and they’ll
sing for their supper. Soon, tangentially inspired by their unintentionally
destructive antics, Dave has that elusive hit song — a Christmas-themed ditty
that launches Alvin and the
Chipmunks into the pop stratosphere. As Ian peddles the perks of stardom to his
new clients, Dave labors to convince them that he has their best interests at
heart, and awakens to the notion of a new surrogate family.

Director Tim Hill (Muppets
from Space, Garfield: A Tail of Two
Kitties) delivers streamlined, inoffensive and unmemorable work — a movie
full of pat set-ups and close-ups. The script, cobbled together from drafts by The Simpsons veteran scribe Jon Vitti
and Will McRobb & Chris Viscardi, is a desultory affair that seems to conform
to the notion that children’s films don’t require quite as much creative heavy
lifting. Littered with wan jokes that seem like placeholders for future
revisions, the story seems chiefly constructed from a checklist of narrative
elements associated with the characters (toaster waffles, paper airplanes, a
remote control car), all designed to elicit Dave’s signature exhortation of
exasperation (“Alvvvvin!”).

There’s no explication of why the chipmunks sing, and while
Dave originally expresses understandable bewilderment that Alvin and the gang
can even talk, this isn’t addressed in the context of the group’s meteoric rise
up the pop music charts. The film instead relies on the convenience of zippy
montages here, which makes the notion that the audience then instantly turns on
the chipmunks when they’re revealed to have been lip-synching at a concert all
the more ridiculous. Musical bits, obviously a big part of the characters’ entire
appeal, give the movie a bit of fleeting pop here and there, but there also
seems a lot of wasted comedic opportunity in terms of the chipmunks’ nesting
and acclimation to their new human surroundings.

The film’s glossy CGI production value is decent and
certainly of a piece with the intended demographic — Alvin, Simon and Theodore
look suitably cuddly and appealing — yet also irrevocably hamstrung by problems
of consistency with regards to size and perspective. Sometimes the chipmunks
are the size of a coffee cup, sometimes as big as Dave’s head. Disney’s recent
hit Enchanted, which also featured a
talking chipmunk integrated with human characters, handles these issues with
much more grace and panache. For the full original review, from Screen International, click here.

Part gentle coming-of-age story, part whimsical animal
flick, The Water Horse: The Legend of the
Deep tells the story of a young Scottish boy who serves as both friend and
parent to a mysterious newborn creature that he eventually has to return to the
nearby Loch Ness. Mixing live action and CGI, and anchored by solid
performances, the film seems poised for deservedly decent holiday returns from core family
audiences.

Utilizing a modern-day flashback device to frame a story and
pitch us back to World War II, The Water
Horse unfolds in 1940s Scotland,
where young Angus MacMorrow (Alex Etel, above right) lives on a lake-set rural estate with
his older sister and mother Anne (Emily Watson), waiting on his father’s return
from the war. Not long after Angus finds a mysterious egg on the beach, troops
are billeted at his home, and Captain Thomas Hamilton (David Morrissey), a
blueblood soldier placed purposefully far from the frontlines, sets out to
impress discipline upon him.

Angus’ hatched discovery, though, proves to be a most
unusual creature — a pudgy, slug-like beast with expressive eyes, fins, a quick
chomp and a love of water. Angus deems him Crusoe and takes care of him, feeding
him potatoes and other odds and ends. But the loveable sea monster quickly
outgrows both trashcans and bathtubs, so Angus enlists the aid of handyman
Lewis Mowbray (Ben Chaplin, above left) to keep it a secret from both his mother and
Captain Hamilton. It soon becomes apparent that Crusoe is too big to live
anywhere but nearby Loch Ness, so Mowbray and Angus secret him away and set him
free. But with the army testing their equipment in preparation for a possible defense
against an attack by Nazi submarines, Crusoe’s future is anything but secure.

Despite being based on a book by Dick King-Smith, the same
author behind the source material for the hit movie Babe, The Water Horse curiously
isn’t exploiting that connection in its marketing. That fact, combined with a
lack of familiarity and/or cultural identification with the source material and
legend of Loch Ness, will likely help ding the movie’s chances for breakout Stateside
success. Still, director Jay Russell, who last helmed Ladder
49, showed his touch with fairytale whimsy in 2002’s Tuck Everlasting, and also has trustworthy experience in another
period piece tale of a boy and his pet via My
Dog Skip, both of which come in handy here. Also, owing to its roots as a 1990
children’s novel, The Water Horse has
a solidly sketched backdrop of setting, and Russell and his team convincingly
create the chaotic adult world around Angus, which makes his identification
with Crusoe more believable and affecting.

It certainly helps that Etel, so arresting in Danny Boyle’s Millions, is the perfect sort of child
actor to hang a film’s appeal on; gifted with expressive eyes and an inviting
countenance, he exudes naturalness and an easygoing sincerity. One feels the
swallowed pain of his separation from his father, and wants very much to
indulge this adventure with him.

If there are knocks on The
Water Horse, foremost among them would be that Crusoe’s growth comes in
discrete, awfully big spurts; one good meal seems to cause him to swell and
double in size. Practically, for a budget, it may not be feasible to show the
creature at 10 to 15 different sizes, but these huge jumps in bulk and
dimension are distracting, even though they’re often featured for comedic
effect. Certain segments, too, including a dog chasing Crusoe around, feature a
needlessly goosed-up, cartoonish sound mix, which is out of step with the rest
of the movie’s adherence to practicality.

Tech credits are nicely polished all around. Bringing Crusoe
to life, the visual effects teams of Weta Workshop and Weta Digital, who
previously oversaw the effects work for The
Lord of the Rings, King Kong and The Chronicles of Narnia, craft a
seal-like creature that actually undergoes some noted facial maturation — no
small feat in CGI. Deep exteriors and beautiful vistas of a mostly on-location New
Zealand shoot (Scotland
provides key exteriors for the MacMorrow’s estate grounds) are nicely
contrasted with cluttered interiors by cinematographer Oliver Stapleton. Composer James Newton
Howard’s swirling score, meanwhile, gives the movie a nicely proportioned sense of
emotional uplift, hampered only by some desultory work in the aforementioned
dog chase sequences. For the full original review, from Screen International, click here.