Richard Crouse

If, like me, you are not familiar with the television adventures of Blossom, Buttercup and Bubbles, the test-tube superhero Powerpuff Girls, this movie is a good place to start. We meet the girls in their infancy, just after they were created in a lab by Professor Utonium. Apparently if you mix sugar and spice and everything nice with Chemical X you get small flying girls with the power to shoot lasers from their oversized eyes. The girls have some trouble learning to contain their powers, and when the evil monkey Mojo Jojo tricks them into working for him they must take a stand and save their city. I’m not sure who will go see this movie. At the screening I was at there were lots of six-year-olds and lots of twenty-five-year-olds with suspicious grins on their faces. The animation is quite beautiful, very imaginative, managing to look completely contemporary and yet somehow retro at the same time. There’s also lots of great pop culture references sprinkled throughout – look for a nod to the banker from the Monopoly game and some King Kong sight gags. It’s a good time waster, although a little stiff at full price with a running time of just 87 minutes.