Doogal (DVD)

The new kids animated G-rated adventure Doogal could quite possibly be one of the worst family films of all time. This reworking of the French stop-motion television show Le Manege Enchante and the BBC's popular The Magic Roundabout is nearly unwatchable. So tiredly contrived and unrepentantly lazy someone should gather up all the DVD copies in warehouses about to hit stores and start smashing them with a giant sledgehammer.

The animation is bad, the type of CGI that was out of style even before anyone had the bright idea of creating an entirely computer animated film. The vocal work is atrocious, stars like Judi Dench, Ian McKellan, William H. Macy and Jon Stewart so obviously slumming for a quick paycheck they might not have even bothered to show up in the first place. The writing is intolerable, a cacophony of screenwriters using every trick in the proverbial book to craft a storyline so catatonic even two-year-olds only watching the film for the pretty colors would still fall asleep.

The story concerns a dog-like thing, with what I can only guess is a mop for hair, named Doogal (Daniel Tay) who must stop an evil wizard named Zeebad (Stewart) from plunging the world into eternal winter. With the help of his friends the singing cow Ermintrude (Whoopi Goldberg), Brian the snail (Macy), a lazy rabbit named Dylan (Jimmy Fallon, as bad in animation as he is in live action) and an anthropomorphic choo-choo train (Chevy Chase, continuing his career free-fall), Doogal must find three powerful gems to stop Zeebad thus saving the world and his girlfriend Florence (Kylie Minogue) from his evil machinations.

Cute enough premise, and for a G-rated film this could actually be near perfect for small children if done with even a smidgen of care. But it isn't, not a single frame free from the stench of mediocrity. Worse, the script meanders from toddler-level moralizations to suddenly throwing out adult-level illusions to The Matrix, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Star Wars and even Pulp Fiction that seem wildly inappropriate. In fairness, the version here has been redubbed from what was distributed to theaters overseas, but even then the animation is so bad and the general storyline so haphazard I can't remotely believe it was too much better.

Doogal comes to DVD with both Full Screen and Widescreen (1.85:1) options available to the viewer on a single disc. There is a featurette on the making of the film, the theatrical trailer and a French audio track for those wondering what the characters sound like in their original voices. None of this adds up to anything worthwhile, however, and even considering my usual inclinations to be gentler to family fare than I am to more adult pictures I can't help but call Doogal nothing more auspicious than a decrypted dog ready to be put out of its misery.