"James and the Giant Peach" (General) Savoy, Virgin, Omniplex, UCIs, Dublin.

It has been a good year for Disney's animation division after the exhilarating and ground breaking Toy Story, the studio's classical animation division made a return to form this summer with Hunchback of Notre Dame. Disney's third major animated feature of 1996 is a refreshing and irresistibly charming version of a classic children's story by Roald Dahl.

James and the Giant Peach, the second feature from Henry Selick, who directed The Nightmare Before Christmas, relies on stop motion, the technique of photographing models, which are moved between frames, to create very different effects from those of traditional animation.

Dahl's story, the first of his books for children, is a far cry from the saccharine fluff that has characterised much of Disney's output in recent years, and it is to Selick's credit that, despite some compromises, he has managed to retain that necessary touch of vinegar. In the opening, live action scene (the central, animated portion of the film is bookended by live action), we meet young James, who enjoys an idyllic existence by a picture postcard seashore with his loving mother and father.

But when his parents are suddenly killed by an enormous rhinoceros, James is forced to live with his cruel and ugly aunts, Spiker and Sponge (Joanna Lumley and Miriam Margolyes). One day, he meets a mysterious old man (Pete Postlethwaite) who presents him with a bag of magical crocodile tongues. When James accidentally drops the bag on an old tree, a huge peach grows, which James enters, meeting a group of human sized insects - Centipede, Earthworm, Ladybug, Glow Worm, Grasshopper and Miss Spider.

The peach rolls off into the sea, and the new friends decide to set sail for New York, towed by a flock of seagulls. Along the way they are attacked by a huge mechanical shark and tussle with an undersea band of ghostly pirates.

All of this is marvellously handled by the animators, who give the voyage a real sense of enchantment. The characterisation is wonderful, with the insect heroes voiced by a high class cast, including Susan Sarandon, Richard Dreyfuss, David Thewlis and Simon Callow, with Jane Leeves (the English housekeeper from the TV comedy Frasier) as the homely Ladybug.

The songs (written by Randy Newman, who also provided the score for Toy Story) are several notches above the usual MOR fodder. In the live action scenes, Joanna Lumley makes a superbly nasty Aunt Spiker, a combination of Cruella De Vil and the Wicked Witch from The Wizard Of Oz. The real stars, though, are the animated ones - for some reason this kind of animation seems to allow for more subtlety and texture than the drawn kind, and leaves more space for mystery and magic.

James and the Giant Peach successfully combines the best aspects of classic storytelling for children with the most sophisticated modern cinema technology. It's a delightful and unusual mix which should be enjoyed by audiences of all ages.

"Denise Calls Up" (15) Light House, Dublin.

One of the most agreeable low budget discoveries on the international festival circuit in the past year was writer director Hal Salwen's American independent production, Denise Calls Up, a cleverly structured comedy of communication breakdowns in a world of hi tech communication.

Salwen's ideas for the movie, his first as a director, evolved after a chance meeting with a good friend at a party. They had been in contact regularly and were up to date on each other's personal relationships and career progress, but Salwen was surprised at the physical changes in his friend who had lost some hair and gained some weight since they had last seen each other. Salwen then realised that, despite all their telephone contact, he and his friend had not met for three years.

In Denise Calls Up, seven characters, most of them good friends, talk to each other all the time on the phone but never actually meet. Most of them are workaholics whose computers and telephones have become almost permanent extensions of their bodies. At heart, however, they all are lonely people who spend their nights alone on the phone, as if their consistent physical detachment from each other stemmed from some extreme fear of commitment.

In Hal Salwen's skilfully sustained scheme of things, at no point in the movie does he allow any two characters to speak face to face on screen. His well chosen cast, who perform with both enthusiasm and ease, includes Tim Daly, Dana Wheeler Nicholson, Caroleen Feeney, Aida Turturro, and Alanna Ubach as the eponymous Denise, a pregnant recipient of sperm donated by one of the male characters in a break between phone calls.

"Flipper" (General) Ambassador, Virgin, Omniplex, UCIs, Dublin.

Big screen versions of old TV shows are two a penny at the moment, but this one must have seemed a particularly good idea, given the popularity of dolphins with the younger generation these days. Indeed, if writer director Alan Shapiro had concentrated on pleasing the crowds with his good looking underwater photography and simple adventure story, he would have ended up with a far more successful film.

Unfortunately, Flipper The Movie is plagued by a bad attack of teen angst melodrama which keeps the fun to a minimum. Elisha Wood Jr plays a surly young teenager, sent to stay with his beach bum uncle (Paul Hogan) in the painful wake of his parents' divorce. Hogan's tough love regime, and an unexpected friendship with a local dolphin, predictably enable Wood to grow up and take responsibility for himself.

Whatever about Hogan, who at least has the excuse of family responsibilities, it's difficult to understand why an allegedly intelligent creature like Flipper should take any liking to the utterly charmless Wood.