Jimmy's Neutron
Summary:
At home, Jimmy has inventions to brush his teeth and comb his hair.
During show and tell at school, he unveils a device that will shrink
people, and inadvertently shrinks his teacher, who is attacked by the
worm in her apple. Jimmy also has a communicator capable of picking up
signals from space, and becomes convinced he has been contacted by an
advanced civilization. "I don't care how advanced they are," his mother
says. ''If your father and I haven't met them, they're strangers." A
crisis strikes. Alien spaceships suck up all of the adults in town. At
first the kids celebrate, but after eating too much popcorn and candy
and drinking forbidden coffee, they're as green in the morning as the
lads on the Island of Lost Boys in "Pinocchio." Jim-my enlists the other
kids in an expedition to find the alien planet and rescue the parents.
Their
space travel is conceived by the filmmakers in a way that is not only
charming but kind of lovely. Jimmy converts some of the rides in an
amusement park into spaceships, and we see a Ferris wheel, an octopus
ride and a merry-go-round journeying across the field of stars. In
another inspired conceit, they stop for the night on an asteroid, build a
campfire, and frighten one another with campfire ghost stories.
Analysis:
Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius is a fantasy about a whiz kid inventor who, with the help of his friends, must rescue all the parents of his neighborhood from the clutches of malevolent space aliens. While there’s nothing new here story-wise, producer/writer/director John A. Davis, producer/writer Steve Oedekirk, and animation director Keith Alcorn, load the film with a lot of cool inventions (a shrink ray, a robot dog, a soda that guarantees one burp per sip) and some funny moments involving Jimmy (voiced by Debi Derryberry) and his classmates. Primary among them is the asthmatic Carl Wheezer (Rob Paulsen) and the smart-alecky Cindy Vortex (Carolyn Lawrence). Together, the kids connive to rocket off to another planet and turn their egg-shaped foes to slime: one method involves slapping a pair of headphones on an alien and blaring The Go-Gos at full volume.
But as a whole, the film lacks the quality of story, character, humor, and animation that we’ve come to expect in the seven short years of computer-animated film history. Davis and Oedekirk try to inject some warmth into the tale by having Jimmy overcome his diminutive size, realizing that his mind is what really counts (pay attention kids: there’s a message there), but the character development feels contrived and takes a backseat to the rapidly paced plot. This plot does its best to entertain with a constant barrage of wacky antics concerning kid empowerment (they’re saving their parents, after all) and peppered with slapstick humor that is often of the gross-out variety (boogers, burps, slime, and flatulence).
Sources: http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/jimmy-neutron-boy-genius-2001
http://www.popmatters.com/review/jimmy-neutron/
No comments:
Post a Comment