Film Review By Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune Movie Critic

At what point might animators be arrested for doing work so ugly it causes aesthetic blindness in millions of younglings?

It's not a question that comes up every week. But this is the week for it. The two cruddiest animated films of the year, "Star Wars: The Clone Wars" and "Fly Me to the Moon," have precious little to take your mind or your eyes off the visual crimes against humanity. I suppose I'm overstating it. But woe be to us and our eyes if we get worse animation of any stripe this century.

The most interesting thing about "Fly Me to the Moon" is its 3-D format. The story's about a bland collection of wiseacre preteen flies who become stowaways aboard Apollo 11. The 3-D effects are used mainly to follow the flies in flight, gliding yon and hither. The scenes themselves have no tension or visual interest or anything beyond an astonishing amount of retro-xenophobia (the evil Russian bugs wouldn't have passed muster in a '60s spy caper). Oh, and Kelly Ripa does the voice of the mom fly. The vocal characterizations aren't the problem here; the script and the animation are the problems, and in feature animation, you can't arrange more significant problems than those.

MPAA rating: G (all ages admitted)

Running time: 1:29

Starring the voices of: Kelly Ripa (Nat's Mom); Christopher Lloyd (Grandpa); Tim Curry (Yegor); Trevor Gagnon (Nat)

Directed by Ben Stassen; written by Domonic Paris; music by Ramin Djawadi; art direction by Jeremy Degruson; produced by Charlotte Huggins, Gina Gallo Paris, Mimi Maynard and Caroline Van Iseghem. A Summit Entertainment release.

Movie search