Product: Stuart Little (1999)
Rating: 4.0
for undiscriminating toddlers
My almost-three year old loves this movie and watches it repeatedly. After all, there's a cuddly mouse doing people things, there's cats, and about half the movie consists of chases of one sort or another. There's also a lot of seamless and convincing animation (except for the "talking" mouths on the cats, which looks goofy). Any fans of E.B. White's book Stuart Little will be wise to avoid the movie, as they have nothing in common except the existence of a mouse-sized boy. It's as if the Hollywood folks made the movie first, and then decided to put a famous name on it, without any care as to the actual words in the book. It's too bad. The movie's plot is mostly fine for kids, who haven't learned to watch critically yet or expect self-consistency, coherence, or variation from standard hackneyed scenes and themes. Adults will find fuzzy wuzzy cuteness, mainly, and be massively unsurprised by any of the plot "twists". If you must view it, Rent - don't buy it. If you have an almost-three year old, be especially careful not to buy it, or you will be forcibly exposed to it time and again. At least rentals have a due date and an excuse to return the tape to the store.