Word: kiddingly
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There are no kids in Hollywood, only a kid market. So the moguls gleefully rub their rough hands at the recent blooming of animated features into a reliable blockbuster genre. Anyone could have predicted that Pixar's Up, Blue Sky's Ice Age 3 and DreamWorks' Monsters vs Aliens would be among the year's top-grossing pictures, but who saw Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs coming? The success of Meatballs, G-Force and Where the Wild Things Are underlines the movie industry's hope that in every jaded teen or wizened adult there's an inner child whose...
...noble-mopey mode) is the leading scientist in Metro City, a floating utopia of the future where robots do most of the work for humans. Tenma is devoted to his son Toby (Freddie Highmore, of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory), a boy genius who's also a nice kid. When Metro City's nasty mayor Stone (Donald Sutherland) insists on activating a kind of death ray, Toby wanders into the lab and is killed. His grieving father creates a robot version of Toby - same DNA, but with cool extras like propellant flames in his shoes and machine guns...
...that uneasy alliance of the gnome-artisans at Aardman and the brasher gang at DreamWorks. What both outfits stress is telling stories through characters, and Bowers (along with co-writer Timothy Hyde Harris) breathe a solid emotional life into Toby and Tenma, while adhering to the confines of a kid-oriented feature. The animation style is supple and assured. And if the audience includes any precocious kids like Toby, they'll be diverted by references to Isaac Asimov and Immanuel Kant...
...wound up and I froze; I couldn’t forcibly stop this little kid I didn’t know, and I still half thought that he was faking. Some gasping syllable came out of my mouth just as I felt a tug on the still-connected headphones around my neck, and the release as momentum freed the iPod. It hit a metal trash can straight on, then skidded off into the street making with a sound like a row of people dropping their cell phones one after the other. None of this happened in slo-motion...
...down the street and the kid ran away, fast. I’m pretty sure I heard him say “I can’t believe I just did that,” but that might have just been me projecting my thoughts. Just before I reached my iPod, a heavily tattooed guy with a ZZ-Top beard picked it off the floor and gave it a look. “It’s okay man...I secretly listen to Norah Jones...