Goofy, feelgood family fun – with a whiff of propaganda
Clifford the Big Red Dog
PG cert, 96 min
★★★★★
Dir Walt Becker Starring Jack Whitehall, Darby Camp, Sienna Guillory, John Cleese, Tony Hale
Move over, wicked stepmother; step aside, handsome prince. The latest stock character in children’s cinema is the kindly Chinese billionaire. Such is the case, anyway, in Clifford the Big Red Dog, a new adaptation of a long-running series of American picture books written and illustrated by the late Norman Bridwell.
The villain of the piece is a selfabsorbed Elon Musk type (Tony Hale), who wants to capture Clifford, the titular jumbo pooch, and pass him off as a successful experiment in order to shore up his floundering biotech firm. His private security team and the New York City police are all hot on Clifford’s rolled-up-persian-rug-sized tail. But here to save the day is Mr Yu (Russell Wong): father of one of Clifford’s schoolchild allies, owner of a palatial Manhattan penthouse pied-à-terre, and proprietor of a sprawling wildlife sanctuary outside Shanghai, where he says the giant canine can live out the rest of his days in peace. Alas, Mr Yu’s generosity is thwarted by goonish American law enforcement – which at least spares the young target audience a tearful farewell between Clifford and his loving adoptive owner Emily Elizabeth (Darby Camp).
This lengthy interlude in a not especially lengthy film is an appeasement strategy: a way for a studio to smooth their product’s passage through the China Film Administration’s censorship process, and into cinema’s most lucrative overseas market. Over the past few years, it’s been grimly fascinating to watch these gently propagandistic asides creeping into Hollywood’s output, though it’s especially glaring in cases such as Clifford’s, since the film is an otherwise warm-hearted and entertaining throwback to less geopolitically calculating times. Aside from its tech bro villain and the fact that Clifford himself is made of (reasonably plausible) CGI, it would sit comfortably alongside Free Willy, Beethoven and the other troublemaking pet films of the early 1990s.
Clifford comes to Emily and her hapless uncle Casey (Jack Whitehall) via the mysterious owner of a travelling animal shelter – John Cleese, twinkling his way through his handful of scenes. But when she initially takes the creature in, he’s the size of an ordinary pup; it’s only overnight that Emily’s tears of affection make him swell to elephant size. Rote but sweet antics ensue, most of which involve the scarlet megalo-mutt bounding through enclosed spaces; there is also a bizarre comic gambit in which Whitehall, playing an American, affects a bad English accent. A nicely maintained amiable tone takes the edge off the inevitable lavatorial humour, while the 14-year-old Camp, of Big Little Lies and The Christmas Chronicles, strikes up an impressively plausible emotional connection with her goofy, lolloping co-star (not Whitehall, the dog).
In cinemas now