Amy Reviews JIMMY NEUTRON: BOY GENIUS
© By Amy Harlib
A series on the well-known aforementioned cable TV channel and now a full-length feature, Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius employs a unique style of CGI animation perfectly suited for the limitations and strengths of the medium: highly stylized, intentionally artificial-looking human characters with exaggerated, huge heads surrounded by brightly colored yet dense, intricate backgrounds.
Their milieu (with the tongue-in-cheek name of Retroville) mildly satirizes 1950s, idealized suburbia, USA, by mixing period and contemporary objects and design elements. By making no attempt to mimic consensus reality, Jimmy Neutron's world takes on a life of its own, the characters having just enough depth to arouse sympathy even while their antics and the sight gags come thick and fast throughout.
The eponymous, precociously brilliant Jimmy (Isaac) Neutron (Debi Derryberry), his self-built, gizmo-laden robot dog, Goddard, and his Ozzie-and-Harriet-type parents (Megan Cavanagh and Mark deCarlo), (except that Mom can do things like fix the car while Dad is buried in the newspaper!) live in suburban Retroville where the youngster attends grade school. Jimmy also manages to have plenty of spare time to spend in his secret basement, ultra-high-tech laboratory inventing useful gadgets: shrink rays, portable jet-packs and a toaster-based communications satellite designed to contact alien life forms.
This last project proves to be a bit too successful, for its signal attracts the attention of the Yokians, an extra-terrestrial race of slimy green creatures housed in egg-shaped, highly functional containers. These beings, ruled by despotic King Goobot (Patrick Stewart) and his chief henchman Ooblar (Martin Short), in their fleet of chicken-shaped starships search for suitable life-forms to study and doom to a deadly fate afterwards and find their ideal specimens to be the entire adult population of Retroville.
The grown-ups get abducted in a delightful parody of 1950s flying saucer films -- levitating up (interrupted in the midst of all sorts of comically G-rated compromising activities) in beams of white light, accompanied by eerie Theremin-synthesizer music, of course! Free from parental supervision, Jimmy goes on an all-night junk-food frenzy along with his pals, an engaging assortment of schoolyard archetypes: lovable, tubby, asthmatic, glasses-wearing best-friend Carl (Rob Paulsen); Sheen (Jeff Garcia), geekily obsessed with a cartoon and video-game action hero named Ultra-Lord; secret heartthrob and second smartest kid in class Cindy (Carolyn Lawrence); and Nick, the lollipop-sucking, prematurely sideburned bad boy in denims with matching jacket. The inevitable sugar-blues consequences and lack of older loved-ones quickly palls and, equally
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