hjones-170-894487 When you start fast-forwarding, you know it's bad.I picked this movie off of Netflix expecting it to be a pleasant children's cartoon. Thankfully I have learned to pre-screen things, because this movie was absolutely terrible.Human misery, death, and suffering are not my idea of a children's story. This movie basically starts with a homeless woman begging for money for her newborn baby so they won't starve. We are then shown people stealing, beating each other, cheating, and human excrement being poured over food--all before we meet the men who are abusing our hero, Tom.All of this, meanwhile, is live-action. You have to sit through about twenty minutes of this awful display of inhumanity before you finally get to the cartoons you thought you were getting when you started, and then there's another 20 minutes of live action at the end, making for half the movie. I don't know about your kids, but when my kids want a cartoon, they want a cartoon. Not a bunch of folks wandering around London getting typhoid.The live-action plot then drags on and on with more of the cruelty. Finally Tom jumps in a lake and is--for no reason ever explained in the movie--transformed into an animated "water baby." I suppose that's a bit nicer than saying "Hey kids, he committed suicide and drowned." He makes some friends, sings some songs, encounters some random enemies, and finally finds the other water babies. This is the good part of the movie. But then the other water babies are randomly kidnapped, and Tom must go on a quest to save them.Tom then returns to the human world, where he is again abused and you wonder why he doesn't just kick someone in the groin already and run off. Finally he does stand up for himself, the bad guys are arrested and he achieves a Dickensian happy ending, which honestly I never did quite manage to understand (did rich people just adopt random street urchins?) and we learn that several creepy ladies who've been appearing randomly throughout the film are actually the same person, which doesn't actually add anything to the plot or make any sense.As a parent, I have seen plenty of bad children's shows. Heck, I've endured Barney the Purple Dinosaur. But this movie takes the cake. Yes, Victorian England was a terrible place in which children were abused and death might seem like a reasonable escape. This does not make it 'entertaining', for me or my children.

TheLittleSongbird The 1978 adaptation had all the ingredients of a potentially wonderful film. It is based on an absolutely charming book by Charles Kingsley. It has a truly talented cast from the likes of James Mason, Bernard Cribbons and David Tomblinson, not to mention the vocal talents of David Jason and Jon Pertwee. There is also Lionel Jeffries, the director of wonderful classics such as The Railway Children and the Amazing Mr Blunden, and while the film is good on the most part, it was also a little disappointing. I had no problem with the performances, particularly those of Mason and Tomblinson as Grimes and Sir John Harriet respectively, and Tommy Pender and Samantha Gates are believable as Tom and Ellie. Billie Whitelaw is also intriguing in numerous roles, even if one or two of them are quite bizarre. The voice cast is also commendable, especially Jon Pertwee, voicing charming characters in their own right. I also liked the incidental music it is so haunting and beautiful, and the script was fairly faithful and in general well-written, particularly at the beginning. The characters, especially the Water Babies are very charming, and the villains are sinister and funny at the same time, I loved the part when Tom and his friends help the Water Babies escape, seeing the shark chasing the electric eel with an axe was very funny. However, I will say the film does look dated, especially the animation sequences, the live action parts weren't so bad, if you forgive the rather dark camera-work. The character animation was rather flat, and the backgrounds sometimes were a little dull, though there were some nice moments, like the scene with the Krakon and of course the first meeting with the Water Babies. I also had mixed feelings about the songs, the Water Babies's song was beautiful, but I found the first song forgettable, when Tom ends up underwater. Hi-Cockallorum is an example of a song, that is like marmite, you either love it or hate it. I personally don't know what to make of this song, it was fun to listen to at first, but once it's in your head, it is perhaps annoying. As much as I like Lionel Jeffries and his films, his direction just lacked the wonder and the magic it usually does. All in all, certainly not a terrible film, but could have been better artistically. 7/10 Bethany Cox.

MARIO GAUCI Very resistible but ultimately harmless film version of the children's literary classic which incorporates an animated portion in the style of MARY POPPINS (1964) and BEDKNOBS AND BROOMSTICKS (1971). The human cast is very distinguished - James Mason, Billie Whitelaw, David Tomlinson, Joan Greenwood, Bernard Cribbins - but their roles range from the miscast (a 69 year-old Mason as a thieving chimney-sweep!) to the inconsequential (Greenwood as a befuddled aristocrat) to the bizarre (Whitelaw plays several 'exotic' characters - including a circus performer, an old hag, a maid and a fairy - for no apparent reason).The animated segment of the film, handled by a group of East-European animators, is hardly inspired but mildly enjoyable in itself and, as usual, with this type of thing, there is an assortment of songs one has to put up with, one of which in particular is reprised far too often for its own good. The film was directed by noted character actor Jeffries who had previously directed (far more successfully) other children's films namely THE RAILWAY CHILDREN (1970) and THE AMAZING MR. BLUNDEN (1972; which I've yet to watch myself but which was released some time ago on R2 DVD by Anchor Bay UK).

Ben Goudie Classic author C.S. Lewis once wrote an essay stating that no children's story is worth the reading, viewing etcetera if it can only be enjoyed by children. I'd say this film is an easy one to hold up as a defence of his argument.Around the age of five or six, I loved it, tracked it down only three or four years later and found it to be wet, poorly animated, dully and confusingly written, and with distressingly repetitive and awful songs (I'm looking t you, hi-cockalorum), showing a production aiming at joyful silliness and whimsy, but resulting with an ugly, twee, frustrating mess.By all means, show this to your infant, but I would heartily recommend that you don't buy a copy or attempt to sit in on the viewing. If you want something set in the same era but with genuine charm and wit, go after 'Oliver Twist' or the BBC's brilliant adaptation of 'The Box of Delights'.