Reviewed - Madagascar: DreamWorks' latest is a diverting business, writes Donald Clarke

Parents still trying to wash away the aftertaste of rancid fish deposited by DreamWorks' foul Shark Tale will be pleased to hear that the studio's latest computer-animated feature is a considerably tidier and more focused business. Madagascar may be less impressive on a technical level than Pixar's recent classics, but its uncomplicated, Saturday-morning cartoon humour remains diverting throughout. Telling the story of a gang of metrosexual zoo animals and their recoil from the wild, the picture allows itself some amusingly unwholesome meditations on the cruelties of the food chain as it bustles towards a surprisingly unsentimental conclusion.

Melman the Giraffe (angsty David Schwimmer), Alex the Lion (cocky Ben Stiller) and Gloria the Hippo (you-go-girl Jada Pinkett Smith), inmates of the Central Park Zoo, become concerned when their friend Marty the Zebra (sassy Chris Rock) flees the park for Connecticut. Marty, whose 10th birthday has triggered a midlife crisis, believes that this corner of the tri-state area may provide the character-building wilderness he's been denied in Manhattan.

After various high jinks in the city, the four friends are recaptured and dispatched to a wildlife park in Africa. Sadly they only make it as far as Madagascar where, unleashed in a horribly unstructured Eden, they all proceed to have nervous breakdowns.

We have been so spoilt by the quality of animation from major studios that it's hard not to wince at the blocky bodies of the principal characters and the garishness of some backgrounds (seawater, in particular, is very poorly rendered). But there is room in the animation market for basic, unpretentious entertainments that don't seek to stretch the envelope.

Younger viewers will surely not concern themselves with the comparatively modest production values when they can enjoy characters as amusing as Sacha Baron Cohen's King Julien of the Lemurs. A pretentious despot, whose collision of accents suggests a Caribbean Jew educated in Italy, Julien introduces a welcome burst of Chuck Jones anarchy to proceedings.

Those youths may, however, be puzzled by the weird section dealing with Alex's desire to bite cutlets out of Marty. Suggesting other, more human longings, the sequence is darkly humorous, even if it gets no closer to making sense of friendships between the eater and the eaten than that Circle of Life business did in The Lion King.