Phineas and Ferb the Movie: Across the 2nd Dimension

At age 50, and too cheap for cable, I have almost no knowledge of today's animated kids' shows. It wasn't all that long ago, though, that I was still watching cartoons on network TV on Saturday morning (of course, I watch cartoons on Sunday evenings on Fox, but that's a totally different matter since those should not be seen by children). Still, I had never seen "Phineas and Ferb" before this movie and knew next to nothing about them.

Still, this movie has enough intelligent writing to make it tolerable for adults, enjoyable characters, and a fun plot involving an alternate dimension. The main villain is enough of a bumbling idiot to be appealing, though his alternate-universe counterpart was plenty scary.

The music was certainly not my taste for the most part, but I don't think it was supposed to be. Actually, like many of the cartoons of my childhood, this movie's music doesn't seem particularly contemporary (Slash was popular 20 years ago, for example), but it's plenty loud.

The kids from our universe are geniuses, and we can be sure that no matter how bad things get, they'll figure out a solution. This sis good for kids to see because maybe it will make them want to study.

I do question the TV-G rating, given the amount of violence. ABC has a tendency to put a TV-PG on squeaky-clean content, so it's nice that they're recognizing this is a clean movie. But this movie has only the cartoon kind of violence, though, and most of it is against robots, and not really enough to justify a TV-PG rating when TV-PG can be given to content that is much worse.

I especially liked the nonsensical but humorous lines given to one of the robots. I don't recall him being given a name, but Irving's voice was Jack McBrayer of "30 Rock", so that was probably him.

It's certainly worth seeing if you're a kid.