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The Mouse and His Child Movie Review

The Mouse and His Child is a 1977 animated adventure film directed by Charles Swenson and starring Peter Ustinov. It is sadly a very messy, unsuccessful experiment.

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“Those wind-ups will wind up scrap!“

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A mechanical mouse and his son have a series of adventures in pursuit of their dream of becoming self-winding. Based on a children’s book of the same name, this story in a nutshell is an intriguing one as it’s about identity, which in itself is a mature theme. The problem here is that for a film about identity, it doesn’t have one of its own.

I can certainly respect the movie for going there in terms of plot and tone as it is also quite odd and creative in a couple of sequences, but the issue is that there are other scenes that are representative of typical family animated entertainment with songs and exuberant tone throughout. The two ultimately do not mash well together and the result is an uneven concoction that simply doesn’t work.

But the biggest issue is its lack of more memorable personalities as the characterization is very slight. For a film that stars Peter Ustinov, the voice acting is surprisingly mediocre. Ustinov himself is good, but most of the other voice actors did not deliver strong performances. The sound quality did not help this matter either as it is quite poor, at least in the version on YouTube that I watched. It has a choppy quality to it that made it quite dated unfortunately.

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The animation is also not great, though it is serviceable overall. The designs and the style itself is similar to every other 70s and early 80s feature, resembling the likes of ‘The Secret of NIMH’ and ‘The Rescuers’. The Mouse and His Child lacks the artistic qualities of some of those films, but the soundtrack is pretty solid with all songs being similar to each other, but still being undeniably appealing. The dialogue can also be great at times, but the film’s slow pace and somewhat uneventful plot rendered it narratively impotent.