SUNDAY 10.30 a.m.

(Ages 3 and up)

Legend of the Sky Kingdom

When reviewing kids' films it pays to bow to the majority. Last year I lambasted confusing French cartoon 'U' - only for it to win a younger audience choice award.

So while 'Legend of the Sky Kingdom', a Zimbabwean near feature-length effort didn't do much for me, it certainly hit the spot with its target audience – those three and up.

My three- and five-year-olds put in requests for repeats in what threatened to be a very long weekend.

However by the end, even I was forced to admit this offering has plenty of merit, with its jaunty Afro-sound track helping to keep my spirits up during slow moments.

I thought the children might have found the setting a bit gloomy as the action starts in a murky underworld where evil robots patrol with metallic hyenas and repress other strange creatures which are also made out of scrap.

Trying to escape the clutches of the evil emperor, the three heroes - Blockhead, Squidge and Lucky – end up in jail where they team up with two rebel veterans who help them fight off a series of murderous creatures including evil snakes, ravenous crocodiles and menacing spiders.

My oldest child found the croc and his booming voice a bit much the first time around, but eventually got over his reluctance during further viewings while my youngest had no such quibbles.

The plucky five face a variety of terrifying hurdles – the Desert of Desolation, the Forest of Fear and Doubt and the Valley of Death. And of course they face up to their fears and overcome them.

By the end I had overcome some of my misgivings and could concede that the filmmakers certainly deserve full marks for ingenuity but perhaps not the same amount of praise for aesthetics – the models were constructed from trash.

My overriding impression was that an enormous amount of effort had gone into creating something quite ugly.

However the novel set construction is also perhaps more visually stimulating for children, requiring a greater concentration to follow the action compared with bland cartoons.

But mainly my two seemed to like Legend of the Sky Kingdom because it obeyed one of the iron laws of childhood – robots are cool.

The audio is interesting too – the music is great (we all agreed on that). There was an eclectic use of accents too – Welsh birds, Scottish wizards, in fact it was a veritable linguistic tour of the British Isles as well as several other parts of the world.

Certainly this film was not like anything I have seen before. My children were soon quoting the script and singing the theme tune. And, as I said, you can't argue with majority rule.