WEE PEOPLE, TWEE MOVIE

REVIEWED - ARTHUR AND THE INVISIBLES: BEFORE the days of Daft Punk, there always seemed something a little, well, off about French rock and roll. Whereas English artists appeared capable of modifying the conventions of American pop into a fresh concoction, their counterparts across the channel often looked as if the leather and frayed denim was chaffing their soft, perfumed skin.

Arthur and the Invisibles, an inexplicably costly French family film from the dreaded Luc Besson, bears the same relation to Pixar's best work as Johnny Hallyday bears to Gene Vincent. It's not quite an irredeemably awful movie. Freddie Highmore, the most talented juvenile Freddie since Master F Bartholomew, retains his casual charm as a kindly boy who, following the customary estrangement from his parents, gets transmogrophied into a microscopic sprite and propelled towards an enchanted realm beneath the garden. There are some decent jokes and the pace is satisfactorily manic. But everything about it appears ever so slightly off-key.

Even before we move from live action to digital animation, there is an uneasy feel to the piece. It is 1960 and young Freddie has been dispatched to live with his granny (Mia Farrow) in a big house in some southern part of the United States. But the accents are all over the place - the boy has, to be fair, been schooled in England - the landscape seems suspiciously verdant, and the locals don't look local to the right locality. It comes as no great surprise when the credits reveal the picture to have been shot in Normandy.

Things get more unsettling still when, following instructions left by his long-missing grandfather, the young hero descends to the land of the Minimoys. The ugly, gluey animation is bad enough. But, my word, the voices. Robert DeNiro, Madonna, Harvey Keitel and Emilio Estevez deliver their lines as if they are seeing them for the first time, scrawled barely legibly in ink the same colour as the page.

Then David Bowie turns up. Voicing a tall, black scrawny thing, Bowie manages to deliver a self-parody so wounding he might consider suing himself.

Like most everything else in the film, it's just plain wrong.