Cute Critter is Monstrous Fun

By TOM COX

The Water Horse: Legend Of The Deep (PG) Verdict: You can lead a horse to water . . . ..

An Arctic Tale (U) Verdict: Cool, but not as icy as it should be .. The Ugly Duckling And Me (U) Verdict: Not a bad egg, but no beauty, either …

IT’S been suggested that Crusoe, the CGI Loch Ness monster at the crux of this adaptation of Dick King-Smith’s children’s book, is the cutest movie creature since ET. I’m not sure about that, but I know which one I’d prefer on my side in a fight.

When we first meet Crusoe, in the early Forties, he’s just an egg, found in a Scottish tide pool by a lonely boy called Angus. However, within days Crusoe is roaming the house, attracting the attentions of a dog, emptying out the fish pond, and inciting the wrath of the Army.

Cute? Perhaps. More fun than helping a wrinkly alien phone home on a boring Sunday afternoon? Almost certainly.

Alarmingly melancholy? Well, yes, but that probably owes more to the storytelling of King-Smith and the acting ability of David Morrissey (as a cowardly Army officer) and Ben Chaplin (as a bitof- rough handyman) than it does to big blinking eyes and scaly skin.

POSSIBLY the first documentary in history to use the phrase ‘that’s just how they roll’ while describing tusked wildlife, An Arctic Tale is Born Free shed of its humans and relocated to the Arctic, with a ‘street’ attitude.

The idea is an admirable one: film 15 years of footage of the life of a polar bear and a walrus, give them cutesy pretend names, and edit it together into a neatened narrative in order to help children become more ecologically aware.

The message loses its impact slightly with the use of upbeat music to accompany heatwaves, but the sense of suffering is always palpable.

EXAGGERATED bug-eyed CGI retellings of classic fairy tales are such a cliche now, one wonders if there’s anything new to be wrung out of the genre.

Judging by the The Ugly Duckling And Me, which reshapes Hans Christian Andersen’s The Ugly Duckling with added vermin, the answer seems to be ‘probably not’. In the end, the main effect of films like this seems to be to remind us just how long it’s been since the inventiveness of Toy Story.

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