Norm of the North

Norm of the North is a rancid excursion into well-intentioned animated chaos that proves to be an excruciating endurance test no one of sound mind or body should ever attempt to watch, and that includes their children.

With its strangely adult plot about global warming and real estate development and its mediocre animation style, Norm of the North is one to skip.

Plays like a bargain-bin mashup of tropes lifted from Happy Feet, Madagascar, Ice Age et al.

The eco-message is rather vague, the villain not particularly villainous, and the jokes fall flat.

Cheap and cheerless, Norm's appeal melts faster than the polar ice.

For the tots, the film is blandly inoffensive enough to offer some Saturday afternoon entertainment, but this isn't one of those crossover hits that parents can enjoy just as much as their kids.

Has little to recommend it. Padded with dance numbers - two in the first fifteen minutes alone - and montages, the best that can be said is that bad movies like this are important to remind us that the Pixar movies aren't flukes.

Sometimes a film critic has to throw himself or herself on a bomb for the good of the movie-going public.

I really don't have anything good to say about it. I guess congrats for getting a movie made.

In an age where even animated flicks are designed for consumption for the junior and senior of our species, this film somehow manages to take the intelligence of children for granted.