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“Arthur and the Invisibles” would have been a much better movie if it had been a bit more literal about its title and stayed completely unseen.
An invisible film wouldn’t have had any of the jumpy storyline, horrific voice acting or racism. An invisible film could not have sullied the good name of director Luc Besson, who should stick to more adult fair like his classic “The Professional.”
To be fair, Besson did admit that he had no prior experience directing animation before, and does it ever show. Unless the film was severely cut down by some outside force like the production studio, the movie simply has no timing or flow. Our naïve hero Arthur (Freddie Highmore) must travel into the magical and computer animated world of the Minimoys in order to rescue his grandfather and save the family farm. Arthur and his Minimoy sidekicks Princess Selenia (Madonna) — the buxom, curvaceous, 10-year-old (!) daughter of the king of the Minimoys — and Betameche, her annoyingly inept brother voiced by the annoyingly inept Jimmy Fallon, just jump from bland scene to bland scene without any unifying concept.
Anyone would have a problem unifying the performances in “Arthur.” In no other animated movie I've seen has it ever been more obvious that each performer lent his or her voice in complete and total absence from the rest of the cast. It must have been terribly hard to get all those big name performers to record on the same day, but in order to splash their names across the screen the producers decided it didn’t matter if none of them cared about their performance.
If I didn’t know better I would say that Mr. Snoop Dogg accidentally tripped into the voice recording studio and was so confused that he just read the lines handed to him – I can’t possibly see how he would agree to be in a film where all the black voiced characters closely resemble reggae monkeys or, in the case of the live action sections, simple stereotypes. Maybe the version he saw was invisible, so he missed it.
We should be so lucky.
<1b>— Matthew Razak