“Playmobil: The Movie”  (G) for kids: *** (for adults **)

WHEN this hybrid for kids hit the screen, I wondered whether I’d wandered into the wrong cinema. Where was the animation? 

Writer/director Lino DiSalvo’s feature movie is another hybrid of mating between a simple flexible toy with which little kids could invent their own play scenarios, and moving images. 

Nothing terribly complicated about that. Both media feed off each others’ inventiveness. And put the profits in the bank.

DiSalvo has converted the toys into a little-kids’ movie with short before-and-after live action bookending animation for most of its 99-minute run time. 

Marla (Anya Taylor-Joy) goes to Fantasy-Land in search of her little brother Charlie (Gabriel Bateman). During their journey as Playmobil figures, they experience many varied and exciting/impossible adventures, from dinosaurs to secret agents, before returning to reality.

And that’s what the film is about. Is 99 minutes too long for its targeted audience? At the screening when I saw it, an audience barely totalling double figures gave no indication of being either bored or excited by it.  But most of them appeared old enough not to require accompanying grown-ups. 

At all cinemas