The Magic Roundabout
The Magic Roundabout
| 02 February 2005 (USA)
The Magic Roundabout Trailers

A shaggy, candy-loving puppy named Dougal along with a group of friends embarks on a dangerous journey in an effort to imprison their oppressor -- the evil ice sorcerer ZeeBad (Zebedee's evil twin). As the world is placed in mortal danger Zeebad who wants to turn the world to ice. Doogal and his friends must recover 3 diamonds that are needed to stop him.

Reviews
kareemhonish-46878

The rope. * replace the o with an a cuz IMDb wont let me use it) scene got me hard. When the springy dude. Took out his 13in mamba. My kids asked what is that mum? To which i beat them for not cleaning skid marks out of my boxers. However, overall i'd give it 8 orphans out of 10. However the heroin overdose scene got to my heart a bit.

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ed_two_o_nine

Well I came in with few expectations hoping to be surprised but in the end unfortunately I was not. What we essentially have here is a CG movie that I suspect did not have great CG when it was released in 2005 and now after I have watched it in 2008 looks even worse, and to make matters worse we have a great British voice cast wasted by a mainly terrible script holding together a weak story line.The premise of the move is that new character Zeebad  is accidentally released from the imprisonment that Zebedee has had him trapped in and preceded to try and take his revenge by turning the world into permanent winter (was that not done by CS Lewis), So Dougal and his pals have to try and stop him.The movie as is often the case for family orientated animated movies where essentially you have a movie containing three or four set pieces linked together by a pot and in this case a very thin one. All bases are tried to be covered as is the way of these films by trying to throw in jokes for the adults too, unfortunately this is not done successfully and I can only remember laughing once at one of Dillon's lines.The movie will run out as you expect and if like me you will find yourself wondering why the cast and characters where wasted. I will not be watching this again.

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xshadowhawkx

My friends dragged me to see this with them for a joke. The cinema was full of kids and I was really embarrassed! But I definitely don't regret seeing it.The plot was, unfortunately, the weakest part of the movie. It was just so Saturday-morning-cartoonish (complete with evil twins, magic diamonds and walking skeletons) that anyone in the cinema over the age of nine is unlikely to be interested. But anyone under that age will be delighted from start to finish.It's the cast and music that really did it for me. Robbie Williams, despite his complete lack of experience as an actor, pulls off his role as Dougal with natural skill and emotion, which is pleasantly surprising. Jim Broadbent and Joanna Lumley seem to have great fun in their roles (as Brian the snail and Ermintrude the cow respectively) and Bill Nighy, well, lets just say there's no one else in the world who could've done Dylan the drug-addled bunny like he did ("no way man! I'm in, like, a higher state of unconsciousness..."). Kylie Minogue did well enough, but she only has about three lines. Tom Baker and Sir Ian Mackellen also seemed to enjoy giving very camp performances as the arch rival jack-in-the-boxes Zebedee and Zeebad (though Sir Ian sounded a little too much like Gandalf). The music, which seems to include vocal performances from Kylie and Robbie, is fantastic and well above average for a kids film today. If you've seen the film, I think you'll agree the soundtrack is a must-buy! But still, it's not all great. The plot is full of gaping holes, and while it mostly works with a very young audience in mind, the jokes aimed at adults are not laugh-out-loud funny, they just raise a knowing smile. There are some rather strange movie references too. It features references to Pulp Fiction, LoTR, and The Matrix (courtesy of some unexpected kung-fu fighting on Dylan's part) and I'll be damned if I saw a Dragon Ball Z reference in there! (Watch the scene where Zebad fights Zebedee for the first time - then again maybe it was just cheesy...) I never saw enough of the original 5 minute episodes to be a fan, but really, it seems very different from the original, so old-time fans may be disappointed, or maybe they'll appreciate seeing their old favourites in some new action-packed situations. It's up to them.Yes, it falls flat in MANY places, but it's also got a childish, endearing charm that may make you wish you were seven again.

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henry-162

When I was a kid (in the 1960s) the Magic Roundabout was a charming 5-minute puppet show. Zebedee came on at the end and said "Boing! Time for Bed". And we did. This 2005 movie is a bombastic CGI spectacle that contains many of the same characters (sort of), a weak script, average jokes, and a plot that manages to be predictable as well as incoherent.It is a measure of how tired this is that the character of Zebedee is very much like that of Gandalf in the Lord of the Rings films -- and that he's played by the selfsame Ian McKellen. The starry cast does what it can with a weak and cliché'd script -- Joanna Lumley as posh cow Ermintrude, Jim Broadbent as the charmingly fogeyish snail, Brian, with top honors going to Bill Nighy as stoner Dylan the Rabbit (using what sounded like out-takes from his role in Love Actually.) Kylie Minogue (there as a draw for the tweenagers) is passable as Florence, and Robbie Williams (ditto) is a surprisingly good Dougal the dog.OK, it wasn't helped by the fact that the family behind us kicked our chairs and rustled their candies all the way through, but I give it 1/10. So why mark it as 5/10? Well, my kids (aged 6 and 4) loved it -- but they'd never seen the original. Are children these days so inured to spectacle that they can't watch a film without extreme fantasy landscapes, fx and explosions? Then again, how do you expand a 5-minute kids' programme into a feature? It has been done before, of course -- 'Dougal and the Blue Cat' was pretty weird, too. But this doesn't really make the grade.

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