Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer & the Island of Misfit Toys

take over the animation house, this is what one can expect. I'm embarrassed to say that I was in a hurry and picked this up thinking it was the original 1964 Rudolph. I had thought that the cover had changed and there were now "special features" on it. This is nothing like the original. It is actually a pointless little bit of fluff.

I remember watching this when I was a young child, haven't watched it since. I didn't even think it was real.

Rudolph travels to the island of misfit toys to help the elf dentist treat the lion toy. As they sail back they get caught in a storm and meet the Hippo Queen who offers to fix Rudolph's nose if he wants it done. While he is away The Toy Taker raids Santa's toy warehouse and takes all the toys. Rudolph sets out to find the Toy Taker and get all the toys back in time for Christmas by using the island of misfit toys as a trap to draw him out.

Dear Lord but this is one cheap nasty little cartoon! Ignore the actors listed in the cast list - just because they managed to pay a few big names for a day and a half's voice work doesn't mean this film is any good. The plot is a reasonable attempt to draw as many films out of Rudolph as possible and, on paper, is a reasonable sting operation but the delivery is awful and ruins anything that might have been called potential.

The godawful songs are part of the problem - they seem to happen after every few lines of dialogue all the way through. It makes it impossible to bear - it really is awful stuff. The animation is also pretty bad. That might seem a bit unfair considering it looks OK and is computer animation, but it is the sort of animation you get in cut scenes on average games on your PC. The camera moves very slowly, the characters cannot move very fast and none of them are lip-synched at all!

The fancy voices do nothing at all to improve it. Dreyfuss does some rubbish Snowman narrator but Jamie Lee Curtis dons a horrible accent to do a hippo queen! (was she trying to hide her identity from shame?). Moranis has an OK character visually but he does nothing with it and the absurd songs and voice only serve to the character of any menace he had before he spoke.

Overall I can only advise that you do not make the mistake that I made by watching this. No matter how demanding your children get, don't use this film to placate them - making them sit facing the wall for an hour would be preferable.

My 2-year-old is watching it at the moment in the other room -- and it's September.

The lyrics to the songs are complex to the point that I wonder how the actors got through them without switching to their normal voices, but I thought they were quite good, despite that.

The animation is not up to Shrek's standards, but would we want it to be? Photo-realistic animation would just detract from the story. As it is, the animation reminds me enough of the original stop-motion so that this indeed feels like a sequel.

The voice acting is marvelous: Rudolph and Hermey sound like they did in the original, and the other actors drop neatly into place around them.

As commented earlier, this takes the characters forward, instead of just repeating the identical behaviors in a different plot.

So, see it. You may find it a waste of time, but it's very much a mileage-may-vary thing, rather than a this-is-a-waste-of-celluloid thing.

Six years after Toy Story turned the animation world upside down, this movie fails to live up to that standard, even though the animation isn't terrible. You have to be looking for faults to notice them, and some critics simply made up complaints ... such as a critic who claimed the characters had no shadows. Completely untrue.

The look of these animated characters is very, VERY like the look of the models in the 1964 original, and that's a positive touch all in itself. They also sound very similar, and a few sound identical.

The musical numbers don't match up to the original, but the story is okay, if it drags a bit. It probably would have been better slotted for a one hour time slot, which would have tightened this up considerably.

It's worth a forgiving look by fans of the original, and it's certainly okay for kids anyway. We won't be watching it a second time, but I'm not sorry I saw it.