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While it might make an amusing opening film for a vegetarian film festival, "All the Little Animals" is a hopeless muddle for a general release. This uninvolving tale of two mental misfits whose mission is to protect all animal life from destruction by man has no apparent audience. After sitting on a shelf for a year after its premiere at the last Toronto Film Festival, the English film is getting a brief theatrical exposure by Lions Gate Films.

"Animals" film marks the directorial debut of Oscar-winning producer Jeremy Thomas. While he has been associated in his career with such luminaries as Bernardo Bertolucci, Stephen Frears, David Cronenberg, Nicolas Roeg and Karel Reisz, no directorial magic has rubbed off.

As the producer, though, Thomas has assembled a top team of craftsmen to make a competent film. But the simplistic and sentimental tale is pitched in strident black-and-white terms that won't carry the day.

Adapted from Walker Hamilton's novel by Thomas' wife, Eski Thomas, the screenplay focuses on a man-child named Bobby (Christian Bale), never fully recovered from a childhood head trauma. After his mother's death, he falls into the clutches of a sinister stepfather named DeWinter, played with such evil relish by Daniel Benzali that Dickens would wince. (After all, Dickens invested his villains with color and wit.)

Running away from his baronial home, Bobby soon finds himself in the company of Mr. Summers (John Hurt), an eccentric hermit whose love for animals causes him to spend his days burying road kill along the rural highways of Cornwall while cursing the careless motorists who run the creatures down.

The film then shudders to a halt dramatically to bear witness to any number of animal burials, rodent feedings and loving close-ups of bugs worthy of a National Geographic special. To jump-start the story again, a highly coincidental run-in with an employee of DeWinter at a holiday beach provokes the fear in Bobby that his stepfather will come looking for him.

So he confides in Mr. Summers, who comes up with the very bad idea of returning to London for a confrontation with DeWinter. This leads to considerable brutality, none of which is convincing or properly motivated.

Thomas appears to want to turn this strange story into a modern-day fairy tale. But the literal-mindedness of his filmmaking works against this ambition. Not helping matters is the film's curious notion that while all animal life is sacred, human problems can be resolved through violence.

Bale and Hurt do reasonable jobs of portraying characters that are more symbolic than flesh and blood. But both are forced to play the superficial tics of mental aberration to the hilt since there's precious else to these characters.

Technical credits are solid, with cinematographer Mike Molloy getting good mileage out of the glorious British countryside, some of which appears to have been shot on the Isle of Man.

ALL THE LITTLE ANIMALS

Lions Gate Films

Recorded Picture Co.

Producer-director: Jeremy Thomas

Writer: Eski Thomas

Based on the novel by: Walker Hamilton

Director of photography: Mike Molloy

Production designer: Andrew Sanders

Music: Richard Hartley

Costume designer: Louise Stjernsward

Editor: John Victor Smith

Color/stereo

Cast:

Mr. Summers: John Hurt

Bobby: Christian Bale

DeWinter: Daniel Benzali

Mr. Whiteside: James Faulkner

Lorry Driver: John O'Toole

Running time -- 110 minutes

MPAA rating: R...