After touching opening,same old Disney schmaltz!

Rating: 3/10 (25 October 2009)

The opening twenty minutes were quite touching (the famous sequence of boy growing through life and losing his true love/wife), but after that it just went downhill. How far Pixar have plummeted since 'Toy Story?'!!!!! The story is just a bit of fantasy of young and old trying to live out a dream in exotic setting, where danger lurks in form of batty old explorer and his many dogs! Gosh, what originality and what a plodding plot, characters, and empty subsidiary characters!! Yes, you just sit there while old Walt works the sentimentality line he did in the forties and fifties, only with modern animation, eg fat Americans who eat chocolate! Sorry I could not enjoy it more, but you suckered me into the cinema (only £3 each admittedly) and gave me a tired rerun of a lot of other Disney rubbish with superficial modernisms. And please can we really not have that cliché of how the real American Dream of family, apple pie and redemption is just around the block? Does every US film have to make Americans love themselves with no criticism - after all the villain is voiced by a Canadian!