Good story, Not enough for a whole film

It's hard to see any effort in the film. There's no comedy to speak of, no real drama and, worst of all.

Story: It's very simple but honestly that is fine.

True to its essence, the characters remain on the same line and manage to entertain the viewer, each highlighting their own distinctive qualities or touches.

This seemed to me like the perfect example of marketing gone wrong ! It's a pre-school property, but they want to get as many viewers as humanely possible, so they age it up to try and get 9 year olds, and add in jokes tailored for adults et al. But without the scriptwriting abilities of a Pixar or even a Dreamworks. Result : my 3 yr-old jumped out of his seat into my lap from the intro - too fast, too loud. I didn't even laugh politely at the jokes BUT I saw the original french version, there is yet some hope that it might have gained in the translation - that would be a first ! And visually, too bright too colorful, ends up being downright ugly !I attended the Paris launch event, and after the viewing, few and far between were those who went to congratulate the team. Kinda heartbreaking actually as they had put together a really nice event.

SPOILERS In the 1970s, the parents of future main screen English actress Emma Thompson, discovered a little French cartoon which they brought across the English Channel. Called 'The Magic Roundabout' this animation was a favourite of many people over the years it was shown. Entertaining and light on plot with audiences constantly joking about characters being on drugs, it became a mainstay of British children's entertainment. As a result of it's success, if you skip forward to 2005 and low and behold, we finally have a film version. Featuring major British actors plus two famous singers, this modern day version is a CGI extravaganza which suffers from one fatal flaw. It's awful. Weak and unimaginative, it contains multiple film, music and drug references without ever actually making us laugh. It could be argued that children will love it, and that's entirely possible, but there are just so many lines involved which children wouldn't understand that questions have to be raised about the chosen market audience. All in all, 'The Magic Roundabout' is a turgid affair.Dougal the Dog (Robbie Williams) is attempting to steal candy when he accidentally releases the evil ZeeBad (Tom Baker). Turning the world to ice, ZeeBad requires three crystals to turn the Sun to ice. With Dougal and friends also after the crystals however, this soon becomes a race against time.It's hard to know where to start when chastising this abomination of modern cinema. Whether you choose to condemn the mediocre unimaginative vocal acting (only Bill Nighy as Dylan deserves any sort of acceptable for his role here), the terrible jokes which are hideously unfunny, or the horrendously bad soundtrack (rescued only briefly by 'Mr Blue Sky') there is enough to be able to criticise for hours.The film is just so twee too. In cartoons aimed at young children, you do have a degree of this sweet natured garbage, but 'The Magic Roundabout' just surpasses all acceptable levels. It's cheap, it's nasty and it really is so sickening that you find yourself wanting to vomit for the full eighty minutes.Drug references are consistent too. In the original series, the characters were not actually meant to be on drugs. These constant speculations came afterwards and were forever denied by the English writers. In the film though, it's like the writers know about this gossip and intentionally put in references. Whether it's Dylan wanting to save the grass or Dougal's sugar addiction, the presence of drugs never seem particularly far away. These links, whilst in a way slightly impressive in a tribute sort of way, are far too overplayed and would pass over anyones head who had no idea about the original series. Ironically despite the constant references, nobody ever really shows signs of being high (except the forever stoned Dylan of course). Whilst this is obviously a good thing since this is a children's film, it does serve as an interesting dilemma. In the 1970s when the characters were all drugged up, they were fun to watch, now after the Millennium, they've cleaned up their act and are remarkably boring. If anything, this film serves as the ultimate advert for drug usage. You certainly wish they'd take something to make them more entertaining.Broadcast in the 1970s, the original 'Magic Roundabout' was a cornerstone of children's entertainment. It stands there proudly to this day. Updated to the 2000s though, the entire premise fails to hold water in the modern world. Awkward and unfunny, badly written and badly acted, this film is really not worth your effort. A horrible waste of eighty minutes, it should never have been made and it is an abomination of the genre of animation. Avoid.

I thought about giving everyone the long version but, to be frank, The Magic Roundabout is not worth it.This has a formulaic plot that involves the characters performing some very unlikely moves.Instantly forgettable.It is a sad day when one has to say that the only reason this doesn't get a '1' is that the voice ensemble is, generally, very very good. After all, a film is all about visual entertainment - something sadly lacking here.But the class of the voices doesn't make up for the film's serious shortcomings in plot and sheer audience involvement. It is very, very hard to care whether the goodies win or not, indeed, as Tom Baker magnificently voices the villain, it is pretty easy to start rooting for the rotter's.Children seem to like it, but in that fleeting 'so what' fashion that is concomitant with a throwaway society.The production ethics of this film seems to have followed the formula of the Star Wars prequels - don't worry about the film, the name will sell the t-shirts.

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.