Doogal: Critic Reviews

Where is it written that 4-year-olds don't deserve a good story, decent characters, and a modicum of coherence?

In Doogal, setting the world right again involves a badly paced quest for three diamonds, assorted jokes that don't land, and a daringly incoherent climactic confrontation.

If we keep saying, 'Yeah, it's lousy, but there's so much worse stuff out there,' and we keep sighing, rolling our eyes, and going anyway, we'll keep getting slapdash, manipulative product like this. Kids deserve better. So do dogs.

A dreadful animated movie stuffed with bad puns and little internal logic.

Eighty-five minutes you'll never get back.

Doogal is an exceeding lame animated feature about a bunch of kids trapped on a magical carousel -- but it's adults forced to sit through this slow-moving, G-rated Lord of the Rings knockoff who will be begging for mercy.

It's easily the worst kid's movie since Spy Kids 3-D, a confusing blur of a magical quest based on an ancient British stop-motion animation TV show.

In attempting to turn a tiny Anglo-Franco amusement into a full-blown Yankee extravaganza, The Weinstein Co. has managed to choke every last bit of charm out of the characters and their setting, no mean feat for a show this enchanting.

The slapdash dialogue and smug vocal talent detract from the visual appeal of the most energetic sequences (like a raucous train chase) and what's left of Danot's designs.

The key frame animation, based on three-dimensional models, is rudimentary, with none of the characters proving visually arresting.

The laziest, most disheartening kind of animated children's film.

A sheer waste of priceless talent.

Too often those behind the slick 3-D animation spectacles aimed at children imbue them with too much adult humor.

A delight for very young children and any parent who'll get the Attorney General joke of "Geneva Convention? I don't care if it's a Star Trek convention!"

A jumble of bad movie cliches strung together into an overly simplistic tale of a pooch who gets in trouble over candy.

For U.S. audiences the voices have been dubbed by the likes of Whoopi Goldberg, Jon Stewart, Chevy Chase and Jimmy Fallon, who add nothing; in fact, the movie drags them down with it.

I can only assume that half the movie got lost in translation, and that's how we ended up with the bald mess we have today.

The characters (a snail, a cow, a rock-n-roll rabbit, a train, a wooden soldier) and voice actors (Whoopi Goldberg, Judi Dench, Chevy Chase) seem chosen at random...

Doogal is definitely a dog.

A wretched experience from start to finish.

Unoriginal and only sometimes cute, DOOGAL is mostly harmless, but dull.

This isn't dumbing-down. This is a full-scale lobotomy.

Doogal tries to be part of the hip CGI-animated club, with all the pop-culture references and feel-good messages. But unfortunately, it fails on all levels.

Hungering for more references to the 'Wassup' commercials, Dr. Phil, 'Bling Bling,' The Lord Of The Rings, MC Hammer, or The Matrix? Don't worry, Doogal contains nods to all of these.

The animation has the low-budget CGI look of meticulous textures but movement as jerky and unpersuasive as Davey and Goliath.