The Inseparables

An electronic rapping toy and a puppet are united by adversity and together they fight crime. Push the button on the paw of DJ Doggy Dog and he'll explain that he's "cute not scary," and that he's "got rhymes that are legendary." Push the questions about Don, the fool, still performing though his puppeteer is long since dead and that "cute not scary" and "legendary" start to feel quite a bit weirder. Discover that Don is given to flights of fancy and tilting at windmills and the advertising copy notion that this is based on what's described as "an original idea" by "writers of Toy Story" starts to look a bit suspect.

That's not, technically, untrue. Joel Cohen (not that one) is one of six with writing credits for 1995's Toy Story, though his most recent credits were 2007's Daddy Day Camp (the Daddy Day Care sequel) and another sequel begat by Bruce Almighty, Evan Almighty. Co-writers Bob Barlen and Cal Brunker are probably best known for two Paw Patrol movies and Escape From Planet Earth. I don't know how much this sharing of duties contributed to something that's episodic and that pads its 90 minutes with a musical number that restates the entire film, but one doesn't imagine it helped.

I'd consider the comparison between it and Toy Story so monstrously unfair that if it hadn't invited it I'd probably have tried to do it the kindness of not mentioning a film that's nearly 30 years older and some fraction of that better. It opens with a quote - "A dream you dream alone is only a dream. A dream you dream together is reality" - that it attributes to John Lennon, but as best I can tell he was quoting or at least paraphrasing a 1964 work by Yoko Ono in a December 1980 interview. There are moments that feel similarly double-borrowed. In a raccoon rescue sequence a whale appears whose tale will be familiar from any number of other places, perhaps most recently Del Toro's Pinocchio. Other moments borrow from Indiana Jones, there's a reference to Chucky and "the grateful eight" can only be a nod to Tarantino. That sort of thing might be to keep adults who wander in paying attention for a few more seconds, while a vast amount of falling over does to entertain smaller folk.

At one point I thought "Oh dear, I guess you couldn't afford the 3-D conversion," as the quantity of things and their ostensible directions of travel seemed far more about polarity than poetry. I was somewhat taken aback by the heavy use of a cover of The Pixies' Where Is My Mind?, which is important to the closing of Fight Club and a weird choice for a kids movie. That pair of disjoints reminded me of The House Of Magic and inevitably the two films share a director. Jérémie Degruson worked with Barlen and Brunker on Son Of Bigfoot and its sequel Bigfoot Family. Maybe there's thematic weight in terms of found families and friendship, or in wise-cracking raccoons, but I'm not minded to delve too deeply because I've not got the right glasses.

I did laugh a few times, and the Quixotic visions of Don have a charm to them that comicly outstrips the rest of the relatively generic digital animation. There's some cute creatures, but this is at best second string. With the misfortune to be in cinemas at the same time as Wish and Wonka I'd be hard pressed to recommend seeing this at all versus seeing either of those a second time. Over the festive period cinemagoers also have a chance to catch re-releases, and something like The Muppet Christmas Carol is streets ahead. None of those have the same degree of goth representation, the Marleys listen to a different genre, and none of them are particularly original either. It's just that the quality of them covers for their familiarity, and while the line between novelty and tradition is usually dashed or dotted, anyone seeing this instead of something else is likely to suffer remorse.