Pun Salad

A PG-rated animated fantasy, based on a book by William Joyce (The Leaf Men and the Brave Good Bugs). Considerably altered, from what I'm able to glean, but that's OK.

The premise: in the forest, the forces of life and creation continually battle death and decay. And—here's the kicker—the battle is carried out by actual tiny folks, apparently continuously. (As you can see from the DVD cover over there, the battle is carried out partially in the air, with the good guys flying beautiful hummingbirds, the bad guys on ugly old bats.)

This struggle is suspected only by the eccentric scientist Bomba, who lives a lonely existence in a remote cottage. His obsession with trying to prove the existence of the little people drove away his family. But his daughter, M.K., returns to attempt a reconciliation.

Unfortunately, she's magically shrunk into a tiny-person size herself—I hate it when that happens—and finds herself in a wee-world crisis: in order to prevent the entire world from rotting away, the good guys need to transport a pod from point A to point B. The bad guys have got the upper hand in preventing this. M.K. decides to help out, and finds herself in desperate peril for… well, the entire movie.

The animation is beautiful, the premise is inventive, and the dialog is very funny at times. Downside: it goes on and on (seems longer than the 102 minutes claimed at IMDB), and the plot elements are somewhat generic and clichéd.

And science would object to the idea that there's "good" nature struggling against "bad" nature: it's not the bat's fault that he's not as pretty as the hummingbird.

But it's not an awful way to spend an evening, especially with the kiddos.