Recess: School's Out

10 April 2012

An evil spoilsport beams a laser at the Moon in order to alter its orbit and take summer out of the terrestrial calendar. With what in mind, pray? Why, to remove the need for the long school holidays.

Fortunately (or not, depending on whether you're a kid or a parent) he's foiled by the small fry of 3rd Street School, a bunch with cleaner mouths than the South Park crowd, known to American moppets by an animated series on their Saturday morning TV.

Disney's full-length cartoon hopes to capture the global attention span of five-year-olds. Adults might think, perhaps, it would have been more sensible for the vaporising laser to be aimed at Saturday morning kidvid shows, thus leaving more time for doing holiday tasks.

But they'll find School's Out an amiable bit of entertainment, primitively but appositely drawn, in which teachers have crocodile teeth and steal the children's ice-cream (though they reveal themselves to be kids at heart in the end) and kids don't trust anyone over 12 and scowl at the broccoli on their dinner forks.

There's a nice midsection that timetrips adults back to the bell-bottomed togs and psychedelic days of The Beatles when folk got in touch with their psyches instead of doing lessons.

Childhood rebelliousness is respected, but not endorsed; adult discipline is acknowledged, but seldom enforced. In all the characters, save the villain and his balaclava'd henchmen, there's a broad-brush streak of wholesomeness: why, even the school principal sacrifices his golf mornings in order to help the kids save the world.

Recess: School's Out
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