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Life & Arts

‘Arthur' falls just short of potential, still cute

by CHRISTIAN PALMER
The Daily Cougar

This Super Bowl weekend saw the release of French director Luc Besson's last cinematic exploit Arthur and the Invisibles, though few have actually taken notice. 

Even though it was trumped by Epic Movie at the box office, our hero and title character wasn't deterred from his own quest: to save his granny's farm. Rolling all into one basic plot element of The Wizard of Oz and the legendary tales of King Arthur with the look and feel of James and the Giant Peach and Final Fantasy, Arthur manages to enchant the young American audience it was redesigned to woo as well as irritate the older and vastly more cynical American audience who begrudgingly brought their kids.

Keeping in mind that Arthur is primarily a kid movie and conceding that the movie is cute regardless, this kind of odyssey where the suspense of all reality is vital, is something we have seen time and again. But even that is not the biggest issue.

This movie was censored from the original French version for the purposes of making it more "child-friendly." The first version is said to take it up a notch in terms of character intimacy and pseudo-racy language that comes in just below the radar. But this skirting of the Motion Picture Association of American ratings isn't foreign to American filmmakers. After all, they weren't too shy to introduce to children Shrek or Happy Feet or Cars or any of these other discreetly racy cartoons nowadays.

In their defense, however, this may be a little more permissible when the fact that those who have felt the arrows of Cupid happen to be about 10 years old enters the picture. The audience doesn't really want to see anything substantial between two tweens anyway. Not to mention, American audiences haven't seen the other version and might never get to, so we don't know what we're dealing with exactly.

The American version did throw a little bone to older audience members: a soundtrack that tends to disregard the 1960 time frame in favor of fun and some actors who parents might not recommend their kids follow into other creative ventures. 

For one, one of the first action sequences is set to "Black Betty" and later, the heroic bunch boogies down and slash kicks some butt to some David Bowie and "Saturday Night Fever." One of the strangest audio choices was Chuck Berry's "You Never Can Tell," which was featured in Pulp Fiction; throw Harvey Keitel into the casting and you have yourself a rather bizarre allusion.

Speaking of the casting, there is an eclectic bunch: the ever-innocent Freddie Highmore fresh from the chocolate factory playing Arthur; Mia Farrow as his Granny; Madonna as his (hush, hush) love interest, Princess Selenia; Jimmy Fallon as his other partner in crime Betameche; Robert De Niro as the King; David Bowie as the animated arch nemesis whose name shall not be mentioned; Snoop Dogg and Anthony Anderson as help along the way; and Emilio Estevez, Jason Bateman and Rob Corddry as other random characters.

And animation just keeps getting neater.

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