Clifford the Big Red Dog

All up, it's a spirited and unpretentious film with some engagingly eccentric bits, the best of which involve Izaac Wang.

It's a live-action world, though Clifford is a computer-animated dog, which fills the whole enterprise with unfortunate echoes of the "Tom & Jerry" movie from earlier this year.

The film is best when it sticks to children's caper mode, jostled along by gentle toilet humour, bad-tempered barnyard animals and a scene of two kids driving a van across Manhattan.

A film so muddled in its storytelling and so specious in its message-making that its very existence is almost nauseating.

It's loud, it's silly, it's over-saturated; the smaller viewers at the family screening I attended were wildly impressed.

A nicely maintained amiable tone takes the edge off the inevitable lavatorial humour, while the 14-year-old Camp... strikes up an impressively plausible emotional connection with her goofy, lolloping co-star.

The last Clifford film, Clifford’s Really Big Movie, wasn’t great, but it at least understood the source material it was adapting itself from and respected Norman Bridwell’s legacy. The new Clifford movie does not do any of that.

Besides being expectedly childish, incredibly formulaic, and exaggerated in every possible way, the characters and the main narrative are far from looking, sounding, and being authentic.

A genuinely lovely and endearing re-entry into the Clifford universe, wherein once again we learn what it might be like to own a small puppy that inexplicably grows up to become a 4-metre-high pooch.

Watching as an adult, Clifford the Big, Red Dog is sweet, cute, mildly humorous and a bit of innocent fun.