The Magic Roundabout

This film is about a group of friends trying to stop an evil Zeebad from turning the world into ice.

This film is for the very young kids to enjoy. The animation is quite pleasant. The soft colours, simple & clean animation, and colourful scenes make it quite visually appealing to watch. Dialogs are easy to understand, and there are quite a few lines that got me laughing. My favourite line is "This guy is seriously messing with my karma", which is something I totally did not expect in a kids' film! The music is quite good, the ending theme song is a Kylie Minogue song that I have never heard of! Putting the intended young audience into context, I think this film deserves more than the current rating on IMDb.

This is very much aimed at younger children - I think those up to about 7 would enjoy it, but my 10-year-old was really too old. Quite a few adults went along on their own to the showing I attended, probably hoping for nostalgia - however this was in short supply, as the CGI versions of the characters look nothing like the much-loved TV show.

The film also doesn't have the wit and charm of the original. Although Sir Ian McKellen is wonderful as Zebedee and Tom Baker as his evil twin, to me it all seemed very thin. Also, with Robbie Williams and Kylie Minogue among the voice cast (Dougal and Florence respectively), it's rather a shame that the only person who does much singing is Joanna Lumley, warbling horribly as Ermintrude!

Years ago there was another Magic Roundabout film, Dougal versus the Blue Cat, which, as I remember, was much funnier than this offering.

My friends dragged me to see this with them for a joke. The cinema was full of kids and I was really embarrassed! But I definitely don't regret seeing it.

The plot was, unfortunately, the weakest part of the movie. It was just so Saturday-morning-cartoonish (complete with evil twins, magic diamonds and walking skeletons) that anyone in the cinema over the age of nine is unlikely to be interested. But anyone under that age will be delighted from start to finish.

It's the cast and music that really did it for me. Robbie Williams, despite his complete lack of experience as an actor, pulls off his role as Dougal with natural skill and emotion, which is pleasantly surprising. Jim Broadbent and Joanna Lumley seem to have great fun in their roles (as Brian the snail and Ermintrude the cow respectively) and Bill Nighy, well, lets just say there's no one else in the world who could've done Dylan the drug-addled bunny like he did ("no way man! I'm in, like, a higher state of unconsciousness..."). Kylie Minogue did well enough, but she only has about three lines. Tom Baker and Sir Ian Mackellen also seemed to enjoy giving very camp performances as the arch rival jack-in-the-boxes Zebedee and Zeebad (though Sir Ian sounded a little too much like Gandalf). The music, which seems to include vocal performances from Kylie and Robbie, is fantastic and well above average for a kids film today. If you've seen the film, I think you'll agree the soundtrack is a must-buy! But still, it's not all great. The plot is full of gaping holes, and while it mostly works with a very young audience in mind, the jokes aimed at adults are not laugh-out-loud funny, they just raise a knowing smile. There are some rather strange movie references too. It features references to Pulp Fiction, LoTR, and The Matrix (courtesy of some unexpected kung-fu fighting on Dylan's part) and I'll be damned if I saw a Dragon Ball Z reference in there! (Watch the scene where Zebad fights Zebedee for the first time - then again maybe it was just cheesy...) I never saw enough of the original 5 minute episodes to be a fan, but really, it seems very different from the original, so old-time fans may be disappointed, or maybe they'll appreciate seeing their old favourites in some new action-packed situations. It's up to them.

Yes, it falls flat in MANY places, but it's also got a childish, endearing charm that may make you wish you were seven again.

On entering the cinema, I did have my doubts. I'd watched the original Magic Roundabout from a very young age, and one false step could have ruined both versions for good.

However, the filmmakers managed to make a perfect balance of "old" and "new" to bring out a whole new film, featuring characters that reminded me of the originals, but didn't try to take their places.

The storyline was fun, bearing in mind that it was aimed at young children, and included the token jokes (aimed at both children and adults), teary moments and interesting yet predictable twists. The graphics were excellent, and most of the older viewers were "Ahhh"ing throughout at the sight of the big, sweet eyes. Looking around, I could tell that the young 'uns were enjoying it too, and that's what really matters in a film like this.

Overall, a brilliant transition from a simple, sweet television show to an enormous, exciting movie.

When I was a kid (in the 1960s) the Magic Roundabout was a charming 5-minute puppet show. Zebedee came on at the end and said "Boing! Time for Bed". And we did. This 2005 movie is a bombastic CGI spectacle that contains many of the same characters (sort of), a weak script, average jokes, and a plot that manages to be predictable as well as incoherent.

It is a measure of how tired this is that the character of Zebedee is very much like that of Gandalf in the Lord of the Rings films -- and that he's played by the selfsame Ian McKellen. The starry cast does what it can with a weak and cliché'd script -- Joanna Lumley as posh cow Ermintrude, Jim Broadbent as the charmingly fogeyish snail, Brian, with top honors going to Bill Nighy as stoner Dylan the Rabbit (using what sounded like out-takes from his role in Love Actually.) Kylie Minogue (there as a draw for the tweenagers) is passable as Florence, and Robbie Williams (ditto) is a surprisingly good Dougal the dog.

OK, it wasn't helped by the fact that the family behind us kicked our chairs and rustled their candies all the way through, but I give it 1/10. So why mark it as 5/10? Well, my kids (aged 6 and 4) loved it -- but they'd never seen the original. Are children these days so inured to spectacle that they can't watch a film without extreme fantasy landscapes, fx and explosions? Then again, how do you expand a 5-minute kids' programme into a feature? It has been done before, of course -- 'Dougal and the Blue Cat' was pretty weird, too. But this doesn't really make the grade.