Thanks for the memories!

Such a frustrating disappointment

Pretty Good

Fantastic!

The veggies never cease to be entertaining.Our kids love them and I have an affection for them as well,but there are elements of this film that trouble me.While I suppose that there is a message that is Christian in nature in the film,God is never mentioned once,nor is the Bible or anything pertaining to it.In a normal Veggie Tales production,God is mentioned at least somewhere if not throughout.I find this troubling.Hopefully,the makers of this series will get back on the ball with their next production.Hopefully they have not forsaken what has endeared them to many people over the years and have sold out to mainstream Hollywood.This would be a rotten shame.Also,all of the usual VT characters get at least a small part in all or most of their productions,yet here this is not the case.We see only seconds of Bob the Tomato,and nothing at all of the French Peas or Junior Asparagus.This is not so much troubling as it is disappointing,I suppose.Overall,it's an entertaining watch,but in the end I see it as little more than an attempt to make a little dough off of a theme very popular in cinema these days:Pirates.So,Mike,Phil,if you ever read this,get back to those Christian values as quickly as you can and restore my sagging faith.

Vegetables who act as if they are human (and eat vegetables of a different order).Some of them act as pirates in a show, and become "real" pirates in just the same way, with just the same distance of abstraction.Its complicated by the further addition of a mechanical race that emulates the vegetables (that are emulating humans). And a further magical ball that masters everything. On the other end are a herd of living cheese curls and another of boulders.This is another of those films which have all their narrative value in the way these abstractions are drawn. The story doesn't matter in the slightest; no character matters. No "message" exists. It only has value in the way it engages the child-viewer, and the way it engages is by presenting layers of imagination, obvious methods of abstraction.Kids used to play by imagining and acting stories. Its a value associated with inner dialog, and abstract reasoning. It is an essential life skill. Kids don't do that anymore because advertising has convinced them that play is toy-centric and stories come assembled from a store.That opens up a need for movies that play with the abstractions of inner dialog, and visually explicable layers.I wish they were more open, more ambiguous and child-generated. And we know enough about cognitive science to know that the age group that this targets shouldn't be watching TeeVee AT ALL.But this IS pretty complex stuff. For instance, they have no arms or legs, and this is dealt with differently. The arm hand operations are simply performed as if arms and hands did exist. The walking is handled quite differently, as if they really had no legs; they hop.Ted's Evaluation -- 1 of 3: You can find something better to do with this part of your life.

I took my three year old daughter to the theatre to see this movie this afternoon. I've heard criticism of it for not having an explicit enough Christian theme - the Veggie Tales are, after all, a Christian outreach ministry to children. Some seem to think they've "crossed over." For those not familiar with that term, from a Christian point of view, a "cross over" is a Christian entertainer - usually a singer - who moves to the secular side of the entertainment world. Elvis Presley (from gospel singer to king of rock and roll) is probably the best known cross-over. The Veggie Tales crew probably left themselves open to that charge by doing an essentially secular Saturday cartoon for NBC. Having watched this movie, though, I think that particular criticism is unfair. It's true that Christian content isn't explicit in this movie, but it's certainly there. There are constant references to help from above; there's the king who tells the "heroes" that he'll always be with them; the same king looks out for widows and orphans; and there's the over-arching theme of the movie, which is that even little guys like Larry the Cucumber and Pa Grape can become big heroes, a la David and Goliath. So, if you get the analogies, you get the Christian content, much like C.S. Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia.It wasn't the content that was the problem here. The story is about 3 unlikely heroes somehow going back in time to help rescue a kidnapped princess. The title comes from a "Silly Song by Larry" in one of the VT videos. It's cute, a bit scary at times for wee ones and promotes good values. But the problem as I see it is that Veggie Tales was never intended for the big screen. The videos are fairly short and usually include 3 or 4 different items - stories, songs, etc. The movie essentially takes one theme and goes with it for about an hour and twenty minutes, which is probably too much for the audience of little kids that were present while I was there. I think this was a decent effort to bring the Veggie Tales sense of values to the movies, but I don't think I'd want them to do it again. 6/10

In this day of incredible computer-aided animation and scripts written to keep audiences laughing, it is easy to get caught up in the quality of the production and the non-stop barrage of jokes while losing sight of another objective that a good movie for kids might—or even should—attempt to achieve: communicating the value of virtues. It is rare that a movie can pull off all three, and I have to believe that effectively communicating values (without preaching) is the most difficult of the three.The Pirates Who Don't Do Anything comes close on all three counts. The animation is good, but it does not amaze. The story has moments of laughter and emotion, but you don't end up caring about many of the characters. And it makes it clear that doing the right thing and being willing to make sacrifices for others is important and worth the effort. In the end, I was glad that my kids had been entertained while having important principles reinforced. This is truly a movie for kids from start to finish, rather than a cute story with mature humor thrown in from time to time to keep things interesting for parents who might not be able set their prurient interests aside for a couple of hours.Now if I could just get those freaky cheese curls off my mind