Little Nemo takes one of the most revered classic comic strips of all time and attempts to bring it to life...which might have been successful if they had not been possessed by the idea that the core audience for a cartoon based on a famous golden-age comic strip would be toddlers.

The beautiful world of Slumberland lives in the exquisitely detailed background scenes, and in some of the movie situations. Songs are good enough--quite good, someof them--and the soundtrack is all right in general. The characters are fairly enjoyable. There are several very stunning surrealistic mooments, and if the entire movie had been created on the same level, there would be little to complain about.

Here's where I start griping!

Well, for starters, nobody would recognize the main character as the tousle-headed boy of the comic strips without being told who he was. It's not all bad that they modernised Nemo and kicked him out of bed, but they've saddled him (get this!!!) with a sidekick flying squirrel named Icarus who (if my traumatized mind remembers correctly) wears a little pilot's helmet and goggles and communicates in annoying Howie-Mandel-wannabe sort of noises.

The second major gripe is the plot, which seems unrelated to anything that probably appeared in the comic strip, but reminds me of about a dozen episodes of Leave it to Beaver, and was the formula I particularly hated. Nemo is given the key to a door and promises never to open it. But he does, and nightmares take over the world. Finally he develops the guts to take responsibility for opening the door like an idiot in the first place. There's the crux of the movie, in all it's lame, trite preachyness. Apart from that aspect of the plot, the storyline was fairly acceptable, though not inspired by anything like imagination.

Third and final of my greatest gripes, the villain, who might have had a fairly frightening prescence if he had been handled well, is given a voice and dialog straight out of the worst Saturday Morning kiddy shows. It was a bitter disappointment.

All in all, my complaints about this movie can be made into a single point: they should NOT have dumbed this feature down into a toddler's movie, it should have been made with respect for the original and for the intelligence of the audience.

In spite of its PAINFUL and forced kiddyness, any fan of golden age comics should see this, if only to marvel at the beauty of the world of Winsor McKay in the scenes where they got it right, and to dream of what this movie could have been, with more vision. I'm not even particularly a fan of the original Lil Nemo (the originals were printed on a full page of newsprint, so the reprints I've seen are mostly too small to read) but I'm sure that someday, someone will make an intelligent film that does McKay's art justice.

Little Nemo is not to be confused with Finding Nemo. Ever. With that out of the way, Little Nemo certain has some very vivid imagery and animation. Not to mention one spunky princess and one very cute flying squirrel. The biggest problem with Little Nemo is its lack of teeth. The villain just isn't all that convincing. He kidnaps the king. Okay? So then what? Not to mention it won't take long for you to get mildly confused. Bad things keep happening to Nemo, at which point he wakes up, but he's technically still not awake and is still in Slumberland. Um. . . Huh? Thankfully, the high point of the movie is the rascal Flip, voiced by Mickey Rooney. Flip gets all the best dialogue. Of course that also means that everybody else looks pale by comparison.

Apparently this Little Nemo used to be one of the earliest comic strips and one of the most important works. I don't know anything about that aspect of Little Nemo, but it's a shame the movie is so poorly done.