Movie reviews

NO OFFENCE intended to that silly old bear Winnie the Pooh (G), but it’s a telling indictment of the week’s releases that an animated movie for a young audience is the most accomplished film of the week.

The plot is simplicity: a ravenous Pooh Bear (voiced by Jim Cummings) gets distracted from his hunt for a jar of honey by the news that Eyeore’s tail has gone missing. Is the fiendish ‘Backsun’ responsible for Christopher Robin’s disappearance also the monster who stole Eyeore’s tail? Whimsical in tone, the 74-minute Winnie the Pooh gives all of the Hundred Acre Woods’ denizens plenty of screen time, as Tigger, Piglet, Owl, Kanga and Roo join the hunt. Adults will revel in the subversive story-telling, such as when Pooh wanders off the page and gets tangled up in a thicket of the words describing his perambulations, and it’s no surprise to discover that the creator of Toy Story, John Lasseter, serves as executive producer on this project. Mark Henn’s hand-drawn images are a throwback to a simpler age before computers dominated animation, and his classically drawn characters dovetail beautifully with the sedate pace and subtle humour.

SUBTLETY is at a premium in Your Highness (16s), a mediaeval romp starring Danny McBride as the feckless Prince Thadeous. Thadeous is unceremoniously dragged out of his comfort zone when his virile younger brother Fabious (James Franco) demands that Thadeous prove his manhood by joining him on his latest epic quest, to rescue his bride-to-be Belladonna (Zooey Deschanel) from the clutches of the evil wizard, Leezar (Justin Theroux). The bawdy surrealism suggests that McBride, who co-wrote the script, is a student of the Monty Python and Carry On films, even if he takes his humour from the Carry On flicks and crude sexual innuendo from Monty Python. The drug-taking, foul language and frequent bare flesh are intended as a parody of the fantasy epic, but McBride’s poor timing and a paucity of decent punchlines ensures most of the humour falls flat. Franco, Deschanel and Natalie Portman — who joins the quest as a feisty assassin, Isabel — are all very watchable, mainly because they invest their roles with a cartoonish intensity. Overall, though, Your Highness is a right royal mess.