Fly Me to the Moon

The 3-D ratchets up the excitement level, and if most of the effects -- a spider dangling from its web in front of your nose, a rocket pointed straight at your seat -- are predictable, they can still startle.

Fly Me to the Moon is lifted out of the ordinary by 3-D images that at times are so realistic that audience members reach their hands into the air to try to touch them.

This simple, fanciful story should hold the interest of pre-teens with the clever 3-D designs, flies that resemble bobbleheads, and a third-act set of Russian villains complete with a femme fatale named Nadia.

While it's a time-honored tradition to animate small creatures living in a parallel world that is a microcosm of our own, the 3-D space element puts it over the top.

The 3-D animation work in Fly Me to The Moon is brisk and sweet, even if the script veers toward fussy and lame in this tot-level retelling of the historic 1969 Apollo 11 moon mission.

For the first time in my experience, a 3-D movie felt bigger than my ability to take it all in.

The animation is great and absolutely so fantastic you'll want to reach out and touch the creatures -- or swat them off your uncomfortable 3-D glasses.

The storytelling is as stiff and awkward as the animated people, leading to wishful thinking about what the Pixar geniuses could have done with the concept.

You'll need to put on your silly hat along with the 3-D glasses. For little ones mesmerized by big-screen adventure as a new experience, however, Fly Me to the Moon might just fly.

Adults used to animation that runs on two tracks -- the upfront stuff for the tykes and a witty subtext to entertain big people -- may grow bored with the kid-leaning sensibility of Fly Me to the Moon.

Fly Me to the Moon would be totally unexceptional if not for its visual telling of the Apollo 11 flight and the fact that the movie is impressively shot -- the first animated feature film in 3-D.

It may not be in the league of Wall E or Kung Fu Panda, but this 3-D animated adventure into space is the perfect family entertainment--a clever and funny movie full of wonder and imagination.

Without its extra-dimension, there wouldn't be a single thing about Fly Me to the Moon that would appeal to anyone older than 6.

The story is inoffensively wholesome, and there may be enough goofy antics to engage young, indiscriminate viewers, but the level of creativity in the animation is serviceable at best.

Fly Me to the Moon represents a leap forward in 3-D moviemaking. Let's hope the next completely 3-D animated movie picks a more exciting tale to tell.

In Fly Me to the Moon, the three-dimensionality does not apply to the flies' personalities. Ratatouille with insects, this ain't.

While technically Fly Me is state-of-the-art -- it shows how the 3-D format can be used as a storytelling tool instead of a gimmick -- the movie falls short in other crucial areas.

The makers of Fly Me to the Moon should have done a few more checks before takeoff. This 3-D animated family film lacks the fuel it needs to go into orbit.

Fly Me to the Moon is the first feature-length computer-animated 'toon made specifically for 3-D. This is a good thing, because the movie would be unwatchable without it.

The script appears to have been designed, created and produced entirely in 1-D: a mishmash of kidcentric antics, follow-your-dream cliches, and innocuously icky humor.

Fly Me has a G rating and skews younger than Wall-e, and it's the 3-D animation that saves it from the mundane.

Young children might hook onto the characters, particularly the overweight Scooter, big on food jokes. But for most people, Fly Me to the Moon is not so much a movie as it is technology showing off.

Fly Me to the Moon is the first animated movie to be created and shot entirely in 3D. Impressive, maybe, but no amount of fiddling with funny glasses in the theatre will keep you from noticing a weak storyline.

Director Ben Stassen is considered a titan of the pop-up format and the 3-D imagery is indeed vivid, but the characterizations are barely two-dimensional.

There are so many terrible jokes about the overweight fly’s obsession with food that the movie seems like an infomercial about how to recognize a compulsive eater.

Fly Me to the Moon is the last and least of the animations of summer, a good-looking, nostalgic but under-animated and thinly scripted child's eye-view of that ancient history known as the Apollo program.

The computer animation looks 20 years old, and the story's crass Cold War stereotypes feel even older.

The flies look as if they were molded from clay, and the humans seem to be made of rubber. The backgrounds are static and drab, and the dialogue is sitcom-pedestrian.

Once the 3-D novelty wears off, other problems become apparent. The editing of the dialogue is just odd, with inappropriate pauses and repetitions, as if the voice recordings were spliced together word by word.

Viewers who are old enough to eat without a bib are unlikely to find much of interest in the procession of puns and generic zero-gravity gags that fill out the film's running time.

While it may seem cliché to say it, not even the added element of 2008 3-D technology can save Fly Me to the Moon from being flat and rather dimensionless.

The script and the animation are the problems, and in feature animation, you can't arrange more significant problems than those.

That premise is the first of countless problems in this 3-D animated movie aimed at very young children.

The moon-shot footage looks authentic, and the filmmakers even cajoled astronaut Buzz Aldrin to voice himself -- but the idiotic story and low-rent animation will bore children to tears.

Fly Me to the Moon is in 3D because, without the glasses-required effects, not even a three-year-old would sit through it.

Fly Me's slapdash animation makes every male human look like a dead-eyed clone of every other male human. And since it's a film partly set at Cape Canaveral in the '60s, there are a lot of male humans.

Has a strained, silly and inconsistent story, bland acting and decent 3-D effects -- if you relish the idea of having an insect burp or sneeze in your face.

Fly Me to the Moon boasts superb 3-D effects and gobs of colorful animation, but anyone over the age of 8 is likely to be bored into madness by the lightweight puns that pass for real humor.

Forgive us for being demanding, but shouldn't an animated kids movie like this one be, at the very least, fun? Cute? Watchable?

Some movies for kids seem as if they're conceived in a drunken stupor. Fly Me to the Moon could easily have been concocted at the bottom of a bottle of gin.