Movie Review: Arthur And the Invisibles

Luc Besson is the wildly inventive French director of La Femme Nikita and The Fifth Element, but he had never made an animated film until he adapted a children's book that he wrote, Arthur and the Minimoys. Freed from the Disney and Pixar traditions, he has combined live action and computer animation into a sprightly entertainment retitled Arthur and the Invisibles.

Parents who have been dragging their kids to one talking-animal cartoon after another will find it unlike anything they've ever seen. For kids weaned on video games, the spring-loaded pacing and Smurf-style characters may seem familiar, but they lead to some enchanted places.

In Besson's color-saturated universe, even a Connecticut farmhouse can seem otherworldly. That's where a boy named Arthur (Freddie Highmore of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory) lives with his grandmother (Mia Farrow) while his parents are job hunting in New York.

Arthur's imagination is fueled by stories of his globe-trotting grandfather, who left clues to a fortune in rubies. When a rent collector comes to foreclose on the property, Arthur follows the clues to a telescope that shrinks him to insect size and drops him into the underground kingdom of the pointy-eared Minimoys.

When the tiny, animated version of Arthur pulls a prophetic sword from a stone, he's treated as the liberator who will save the Minimoys from the evil wizard Maltazard (voice of David Bowie). But Arthur has a spunky rival for the role: Princes Selenia (Madonna), who joins him on a treacherous journey to Maltazard's lair and the fortune in rubies that might save the farm.

The journey includes a dogfight with mosquitoes and a tuneful pit stop at a watering hole run by a Rasta man (Snoop Dogg).

Besson's style is more bell-bottom hippie than Hollywood tidy, so instead of making sense of the story, puzzled grown-ups should take a cue from their kids and just go with the flow.