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DVD Review Stuart Little starring Geena Davis, Hugh Laurie, Jonathan Lipnicki, and the voices of Michael J. Fox, Jennifer Tilly, Nathan Lane & Chazz Palminteri. Directed by Rob Minkoff.   DVD Columbia Tristar CVR28809, £19.99   [81 minutes] 1.85-1 anamorphically enhanced, Dolby Digital. Release date 27 November, also available simultaneously on video rental and retail. A slightly different version of this review appears in Gary Dalkin's regular DVD review column in Matrix, the Newsletter of the British Science Fiction Association. Depending on whether you prefer your animated mice to be more like Mickey or Tom will colour how you react to Stuart Little. Stuart is the kind of mouse who makes the Disney icon look like The Terminator incarnate. He is definitely not for fans of The Itchy and Scratchy Show. He is though, very popular with young children, the clear market for this film. This is not one of those small-talking-people movies like The Borrowers which can be enjoyed by audiences of any age, or resourceful rodent movies like Mousehunt which are perhaps better appreciated by an adult audience; for although Stuart is small and wears clothes and talks like The Borrowers, and is a mouse and is resourceful like the hero of Mousehunt he is also an irritating little twerp saddled with an unhealthily large dose of all-American syrup. The film has been a huge hit, and obviously lots of small people liked it because as the PR states, the film sold 5.2 million copies on video in its first five days on retail release in the USA. Yet this is a very slight tale. A vaguely 1940's upper-middle class New York family (the film is set in a fantasy no-time-land rather like The Borrowers and is adapted from a novel first published in 1945) adopt a mouse, the titular hero. As voiced by Michael J. Fox he is cuteness personified. Quite rightly the household cat, a suffering anti-hero burdened with the moniker Snowbell (splendidly voiced by Nathan Lane from Mousehunt), tries to eat Stuart the moment he sees him. What plot there is revolves around Stuart bonding with his human brother (Jonathan Lipnicki), a disgustingly cute moppet from the Culkin/Temple school of child stars, wondering about his real family, and trying to avoid Snowbell's mouse-disposal schemes. Anyone over the age of 7 will almost certainly side with the feline, and thereby regard the film as a dark tragedy. The moment when the film-maker's twist Snowbell's character out of any plausible feline shape to save the mouse's day is shameless. That the whole thing is unbelievable should perhaps, accepting the nature of the film, give us little cause for concern, but then this is an M. Night Shyamalan screenplay, so maybe it is just inevitable that it is as senseless, even on its own terms, as his The Sixth Sense. Even for a fairytale the 'logic' is arbitrary. Just for a moment ponder why the mouse wears clothes and can talk to both cats and humans, but while the cats can talk to each other as well as the mouse (that remember, can talk to humans), these cats neither wear clothes nor talk to humans. The saving grace of the film is that it is very short, on DVD coming in at just 75 minutes plus 6 minutes of end credits. There is a fair set piece of a boat race, but one of the bonus features shows the storyboards detailing just how much more ambitious and imaginative this sequence was intended to be before the moneymen nixed the idea. What is in the movie is a pale shadow of the original conception. The final showdown with Stuart and a gang of cats in Central Park in the dark is very well done, though there is still some way to go before we see a completely convincing computer-generated moggy. If the film is thin stuff, the DVD offers a lot of breadth if not much depth. There are five-minutes worth of scenes which were deleted for good reason, in that they add nothing to the storytelling. Though one does flesh out the role of the parents, Geena Davis and Hugh Laurie. There is an 'interactive featurette' on the digital animation, but all the interactive part means is that the footage has been broken down into 24 irritatingly short sections, after each of which one has to use the remote to get to the next. Also included is a quiz game for children, and a rather nice idea, a read-along storybook, with the option to have the text read by Michael J. Fox. There are five songs credited on the end titles, two of which are performed over the end titles and are utterly out-of-keeping with the feel of the film. Among the special features are three music videos. One for a Brian Setzer rock 'n' roll number which does at least appear, if very briefly in the body of the main feature, one for a ballad by Trisha Yearwood which has been product-placed on the end title of the movie and has nothing to do with Stuart Little either in style or content. And finally, one by Spice Girl bimbo-clones R-Angels, which doesn't appear anywhere at all in the feature film and is therefore completely irrelevant, seemingly existing to promote one of those spurious 'music from and inspired by' 'soundtrack' albums. It is of course dreadful rubbish. It is also rather disturbing that, as appended to a film aimed at very young children that video wholeheartedly endorses the 'use' of a ouija board. Whatever one thinks about the spiritual reality behind these things, there is ample evidence of the psychological damage experiments with such 'games' have caused. Given this concentration on irrelevant music, it is a shame an isolated track of Alan (Mousehunt) Silvestri's musical score - part sub-John Williams schmaltz, part infectiously catchy sub-Gershwin orchestral jazz - was not included. All that said, the real meat of the bonus features comes in the form of two commentary tracks, one from the director and animation supervisor, one from the visual effects team. These are actually interesting even if you don't like the film, particularly for those eager for every last scrap of information regarding the technical aspects of modern fantasy movie-making. The anamorphically enhanced 1.85-1 picture is outstanding, and the Dolby Digital sound is very precise and clear. Undeniably, this DVD is a class act with enough special features (there are others I haven't mentioned, including some not included on the review DVD I was sent) to make it good value for anyone who likes the movie. While I will cheerfully admit that I didn't like the film, plenty of people disagree. Reviewer Gary S. Dalkin	Reviews from previous months You can purchase CDs, tickets and musician's accessories and Save around 22% with these retailers : Concert and Show tickets Musicians accessories
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