[home]   [current reviews]   [review archive]  [ukey say...]   [song of the week]  [retrospectives]
[links]   [frequently asked questions]   [e-mail]

  
Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius

***

Cinema Releases - March 22, 2002

Rated on a 4-star scale. Certificate U. 82 minutes. Directed by John A. Davis. Written by John A. Davis, Steve Oedekerk, J. David Stern, David N. Weiss; from a story by Davis and Oedekerk. An animated film with the voices of Debi Derryberry, Megan Cavanagh, Martin Short, Patrick Stewart, Rob Paulsen, Candi Milo.

Jimmy Neutron is a pretty neat character, but only because he's so thoroughly nerdy that he goes past nerdiness and double-backs it into the cool zone. At the beginning of this movie he builds a spaceship using household items, flies out of the atmosphere and plants a toaster in space for use as a satellite. He has fashioned his basement into a lab. His dog is a mechanical invention. He speaks in such technical sentences as "Gee-whizz, the quad-meter is up to ten-trillion gigo-joules!"

Any scientists reading this will be wincing -- the quote above doesn't make a whole lot of sense. Indeed the science in "Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius" is pretty lame -- we see kids travelling through space in open-top go-karts, somehow unaffected by the lack of air or gravity, and in one scene Jimmy uses a computerised handwriting scanner to decipher that a note wasn't composed by his parents, even though we can tell at a glance that it's typewritten.

The plot sees Jimmy accidentally contact an alien race that wants to kidnap the adults in his neighbourhood and have them for supper -- yes, it's another one of those movies with a plot so unimaginative that extra terrestrials speak English and want nothing more than to eat humans. But there's good stuff along the way. Jimmy's inventions are wacky and visually pleasing, and the characters are joyfully exaggerated caricatures of school kids who behave immaturely while speaking in vernaculars far too advanced for them (meaning long words, not naughty ones).

It's goofy fun. Whiz-kids whiz around and yell at each other, in colourful computer animation that bounces around playfully while ballooning the dimensions its characters and settings. There are occasional moments of self-consciousness ("Who's Poltra?" "Poltra is our almighty God, whose wrath... oh, I get tired of explaining this -- roll tape!"), but this is not one of those movies like "Monsters, Inc.", where in-jokes pepper every scene and make things work on multiple levels. It's mainly driven by simple cartoonish enthusiasm. This is one of those movies that you watch when you've got nothing better to do, munching jelly babies and smiling at the exuberance on the screen.

As much as I like "Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius", I have no idea how the movie got an Oscar nomination in the new category of Best Animated Feature. There were nine eligible films, and the Academy still managed to pick the wrong three. In the year of "Final Fantasy", "Osmosis Jones" and "Waking Life", there is no excuse for nominating "Jimmy Neutron", which breaks no new ground in its comedy or technique, and is a frivolous bit of comic book charm.

COPYRIGHT© 2002 Ian Waldron-Mantgani

2002 Reviews (alphabetical)
2002 Reviews (by star rating)
Archive of all cinema reviews (alphabetical)
Review Archive Index

UK Critic main page