Igor: Critic Reviews

Igor tries to spoof Mary Shelley just as Shrek did the Brothers Grimm, but something tells us this movie's charmless hero won't make an ogre-size impression on kid audiences. Call it a hunch.

There's scant reward for sitting through Igor, an animated twist on the Frankenstein story that never sparks to life.

This film is outclassed by the Pixar stable, but it's entertaining stuff for the children.

While this is no WALLE, or Ratatouille, it does bring to mind Monsters, Inc. and some of the visual flair of Burton's The Corpse Bride.

Even the desolate future envisioned in this summer's hit Wall-E has more immediate appeal for kids who might not be familiar with the source material for Igor.

To convince you that it's full of surprises, the movie throws in Louis Prima songs where they don't belong, and it riffs on classic monster-movie cliches mostly by spinning them into newly unfunny cliches.

You can think of it as an animated riff on the American dream: Our fate is determined not by the accident of our birth, but our own will, intelligence and talent. And let's not forget serendipity.

My kid went with it, and I had a fairly good time, as I waited for the reappearance of a marble-mouthed peasant tart, voiced by Jennifer Coolidge. Half the time her line readings are hilarious, and it's impossible to know why.

With its belabored gags, misfired pop-culture references and garish visuals crammed together like so many disjointed body parts, this manic kidpic cranks up the annoy-o-meter early on and rarely lets up.

Pieced together from Tim Burton and various other sources with more desperation than inspiration.

There's enough good stuff here that a better 'toon could have been stitched together from the many promising funny parts.

Igor, like the Frankenstein's monster at the centre of its tired plot, looks like something cobbled together out of used, very used, parts.

A Frankensteinian mishmash of parts, with drawings that are derived from Tim Burton grafted onto a script filled with Shrek-style sarcasm.

Although the visuals tantalize and the actors providing the voices add a lot of sass, the result is only so-so.

A potentially original premise and an eager voice cast led by John Cusack and Molly Shannon are left to decay amid a clunky story vaguely reminiscent of Monsters, Inc. and images often resembling visuals rejected from Tim Burton's Corpse Bride.

Igor has charm but misses a grand opportunity to evoke the world of James Whale when it would rather crib blatantly from Tim Burton.

There's a lurking feeling that somewhere along the production line, nervous studio types ordered changes to make the movie more commercial.

Director Anthony Leondis needs to go back to the lab.

As far as goes its ability to stifle the young imagination, Igor has no recent competitor.

A fun time-killer for kids aged tween and up...

Igor celebrates a defiantly adolescent and suitably caricatured vision of mortality with the potential to have adults and special young malcontents in stitches.

Igor sends up all sorts of cliches, but -- by degenerating into a mawkish romance and a boring race against time -- it also becomes one.

If you are the type that wishes filmmaker Tim Burton still put his name to funky animated monstrosities like The Nightmare Before Christmas, then Igor will fit the bill just nicely.