MOVIE REVIEWS

Review by Filipe Manuel Neto

**A good film for children that can, due to its sweetness, make adults feel that they are left in the room.** Watching this film is like listening to a fairy tale, or a fable, set in our days. It's the best way I've found to describe it. What we have is a family that decides to adopt a little white mouse, orphaned, after a visit to an orphanage, and that will count on the hostility of the house cat, unhappy that it now has a mouse as its owner. I saw the movie when I was a kid, at the cinema, and I really liked it. Now, more than twenty years later, I decided to see him again as the adult person that I am and I had a slightly different feeling. The film is extremely simple, Rob Minkoff's direction managed to understand the sweetness and simple effectiveness of the work he had in hand, but was not able to moderate the sugar. That is, we feel, several times during the film, that there is an excess of sweetness, and this makes the adult audience feel like they are too much in the room. I felt it now and that was the big problem with the film for me, a problem that most kids will have ignored without much difficulty. If little Stuart is a truly adorable character, the same may not be consensual when we think of his adoptive family. The characters weren't as well developed as they could have been, even considering it's a movie for children and young people. Geena Davis and Hugh Laurie do a very good job as the parents and Jonathan Lipnicki is not far behind, lending his character a welcome authenticity. Even so, there remains the question of what the actors could have done with better material in their hands. The work of the voice actors is quite good. Michael J. Fox and Nathan Lane deserve full attention in this department. On a technical level, I think we really have to highlight all the CGI animation involving the animals and their attitudes on a positive note. The effects are also very well done and you can see that there is some financial investment in the film. Of course, a small, almost toy house in the middle of Central Park, one of the most expensive plots of land imaginable, is hard to believe, but that's a detail. The very familiar-looking sets and costumes, hinting at the 50s a bit, were also a nice addition, and the soundtrack does a smart job.