IT’S TATE & VILE JUNK
Lightweight and easy to use – even clean with just one hand. THERE are family films and there are kids’ films, and this breezy star-free animation is firmly on one side of the divide. Unlike the sophisticated fare of DreamWorks, Disney and Pixar, The Son of Bigfoot is made purely for young cinemagoers.
Parents may miss the snarky, double-edged jokes but there is plenty here for smaller children to get to their milk teeth into.
An opening action sequence announces that it’s also the product of Belgian outfit nWave Pictures – the 3D pioneers behind The House of Magic, A Turtle’s Tale and Robinson Crusoe.
As a scientist is chased through a forest by goons in a helicopter, we are hit with one of those eye-popping point-ofview shots that made their previous animations such a queasy delight.
The story is a far flatter affair – a 13-year-old misfit called Adam is experiencing very unusual growing pains.
When stressed, his feet burst out of his trainers, he can see around corners and no matter how short his mother cuts his hair, it returns to the same unruly bushy style within seconds.
This makes him a target for school bullies, but as with Tobey Maguire’s Spider-Man, super-puberty also gives him a way out of a tight corner.
It turns out it’s not down to hormones, it’s in the genes. Adam discovers that his dad isn’t dead but is a kindly Bigfoot who is now hiding out in a forest near their Oregon home.
He’s also the shaven scientist we saw in the opening scene. The men chasing him are from HairCo, a sinister male grooming company who want to harvest his genes for a new hairrestoring product.
When Adam heads into the woods for a family renunion he inadvertently leads HairCo’s blond bouffanted supremo Wallace Eastman (think a leaner, younger Donald Trump) to his dad’s treehouse hideout.
To help them escape their clutches, Adam and his Sasquatch pop recruit a team of furry and very familiar sidekicks.
There is little we haven’t seen before, but a slapstick talking bear provides some hearty laughs.
The animation is cartoony but decent. The best scenes seem to have been engineered for 3D and include a race through the forest, a toboggan ride and a showdown on a mountain-top.
The dialogue could be wittier but the scary scenes are short-lived, the pace is brisk and the message is big-hearted but not too preachy.