The Magic Roundabout

When I was a kid (in the 1960s) the Magic Roundabout was a charming 5-minute puppet show. Zebedee came on at the end and said "Boing! Time for Bed". And we did. This 2005 movie is a bombastic CGI spectacle that contains many of the same characters (sort of), a weak script, average jokes, and a plot that manages to be predictable as well as incoherent.

It is a measure of how tired this is that the character of Zebedee is very much like that of Gandalf in the Lord of the Rings films -- and that he's played by the selfsame Ian McKellen. The starry cast does what it can with a weak and cliché'd script -- Joanna Lumley as posh cow Ermintrude, Jim Broadbent as the charmingly fogeyish snail, Brian, with top honors going to Bill Nighy as stoner Dylan the Rabbit (using what sounded like out-takes from his role in Love Actually.) Kylie Minogue (there as a draw for the tweenagers) is passable as Florence, and Robbie Williams (ditto) is a surprisingly good Dougal the dog.

OK, it wasn't helped by the fact that the family behind us kicked our chairs and rustled their candies all the way through, but I give it 1/10. So why mark it as 5/10? Well, my kids (aged 6 and 4) loved it -- but they'd never seen the original. Are children these days so inured to spectacle that they can't watch a film without extreme fantasy landscapes, fx and explosions? Then again, how do you expand a 5-minute kids' programme into a feature? It has been done before, of course -- 'Dougal and the Blue Cat' was pretty weird, too. But this doesn't really make the grade.