WILD AND WOOLLY MISADVENTURE

REVIEWED - THE WILDTHE COMPUTER-animated film appears to be a binary species. For every divine Finding Nemo there is a satanic Shark Tale. A Bug's Life could, perhaps, not have flourished without its sinister doppelganger, Antz.

Few of these earlier - let us be charitable - coincidences have, however, been quite as striking as that which binds DreamWorks' passable Madagascar to Disney's pretty useless The Wild.

Both films concern a group of animals from the Central Park Zoo who escape, first to the city, and then, after an eventful voyage, to a jungle wilderness for which their urban upbringing has left them dangerously unprepared. In both films one of the characters ends up being worshipped as a god (here by wildebeests; in Madagascar by lemurs). My word, the copyright lawyers of southern California must have been busy this last year.

To be fair, the animation in The Wild is considerably more impressive than that in Madagascar. The water looks like water and the creatures have an impressive mass to them. But the script is marinated in a glutinous syrup whose unlovely stench recalls such projects from Disney's wilderness years as The Fox and the Hound. Setting their word processors to American cinema's default setting - "fathers and sons" - the scriptwriters have delivered the nauseating tale of a lion cub trying to discover his roar. The attempts to flesh out this drippy tale with zany subplots are, at best, lame and, at worst, faintly dubious.

Would Disney really feel able to caricature, say, African-Americans the way they caricature Asians with their bouncy-headed Indian pigeons here? Only Eddie Izzard, whose vocal turn as a deranged koala has a loose, improvised feel, manages to instil any real zest into proceedings. On this evidence, Pixar's Cars just has to turn up to secure its maker's position as the senior figures in Disney's animation wing.