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    Hildegarde (Rental)
    Buena Vista/Buena Vista . R4 . COLOR . 112 mins . PG . PAL

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    Hildegarde is a duck who can quack, waddle and do other duck-things. But that's that. For the animal star of a children's movie, she is remarkably untalented. She can't talk, or pursue evil-doers. Her range is decidedly limited.

    In this Aussie children's movie, animals stay animals and aren't expected to be anything else. She's a duck, and dearly loved by the children who share her piece of countryside, and I guess that's the point of this film.

    For when Hildegarde gets kidnapped by bird-snatchers, headed by the evil Richard E. Grant, she is totally helpless. It's entirely up to the children to save her, before she gets sent to the big roast-dinner in the sky.

    This is a pretty routine kids-flick, though it is enlivened by the presence of Richard E Grant as chief villain and Tara Morice as the children's mother. Acting honours go to Tom Long as Richard E Grant's hapless sidekick; he seems the only actor able to create a rounded role. Richard E Grant sort of floats through his role, in a happily evil manner - he's a pantomime villain, but enjoyable nonetheless. Tara Morice is obviously a fine actor - she just isn't in enough scenes to make much of her role.

    The three kids are pretty average in the acting stakes, sometimes acting quite naturally, other times over-emoting in scenes worthy of the worst Shakespearian ham, though the youngest, the girl Gezelle Byrnes, shows a lot of promise.

    There's lashings of political correctness, at its most obvious when the kids talk about how their dad died from cigarette smoking. "We should have cried more to get him to stop", they sob to each other. This might save a few lives a few decades from now, but it's pretty annoying for anyone older than eight.

    But the target audience seems younger than eight (at least, I hope it is), and probably won't notice just how unsubtle this, and most of the movie, is. They'll just want to see Hildegarde waddling down to the river, tail in the air, or watch the triumphant ending, as her clutch of eggs hatches and the ducklings emerge.

    In the end, it's only very young children who will judge this movie, and it's probably a fair-enough flick for a wet afternoon. But as an adult judge, I'd say that it's neither original enough nor charming enough to become a classic, in the way the second film version of Fatty Finn has - the version with Ben Oxenbould, Noni Hazlehurst and Bert Newton. Now, that WAS a great kid's movie - my children wore out two video copies of that one, and my wife and I a third.

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    The full-frame image looks just great, far better than most DVD images. Clarity is well-nigh perfect, at virtual anamorphic standard.

    Audio is very standard two-channel Dolby Digital stereo, clear enough for family viewing purposes - no better nor worse than expected for what looks like a 'made-for-video' production.

    The only extra listed is 'scene-selection', so in other words there are none.


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  •   And I quote...
    "A fair-enough flick for the under-eights on a wet afternoon, but it's neither original enough nor charming enough to become a children's classic."
    - Anthony Clarke
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