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.

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.

It feels like one of those live-action Disney features that were so prevalent during the 1970s -- one could easily picture Jodie Foster as the prepubescent heroine, Dean Jones as her bumbling uncle, and Don Knotts as the supremely self-satisfied villain.

Clifford the Big Red Dog is a scrappy delight. It may not have a lot on its mind and it stumbles all over the place but it delights in where it counts and its basic charms are almost irresistible.