The House of Magic

'Bloody 3D! No one knows how to use it properly. There should be things flying at you, loads of POV shots of running across things, or under things, or jumping through things. You should feel like you're 'in' the scene. That’s how it should be done.'

That's me imagining what went through the minds of directors Jeremy Degrusson and Ben Stassen (A Turtle's Tale: Sammy's Adventures) when they kick-started Belgium's nWave Pictures back in the nineties, as their visuals set out to capitalise on 3D. This latest certainly justifies the reasons to charge more for those cumbersome glasses, but a concentration on the visuals comes at the expense of losing sight of the film's real strongpoint – Degrusson and Stassen's wonderful clockwork toys.

Thunder (Murray Blue) is a cat who loses its owner while moving house. Chased by an angry dog, Dylan finds himself at the titular house, owned by a Doc Brown-type magician (Doug Stone) who happily shares his abode with a grumpy rabbit (George Babbit), a mouse (Shanelle Gray), and a host of sentient toys. However, greedy real estate nephew Daniel (George) tries to snake the house out from under his uncle by placing him in a retirement home. Can Thunder help the gang and the old man keep their house?

With Disney/Pixar, Dreamworks, Blue Sky et al dominating your local multiplexes, I get a warm glow to see a small studio competing with the big boys. nWave Pictures have an unabashed innocence about them – these movies are made especially for the kids who are too young to get the pop culture references (although Big's Zoltar machine does make an appearance).

More could have been made of the magician's living clockwork toys, a mashup of Tim Burton, Sid's unfortunates from Toy Story, and 9's Steampunk dolls, but writer Stassen concentrates on the cat-rabbit-mouse conflict (they don't get on), which was never going to have the same wonder as the light bulb with legs or the moustachioed organ grinder or the chef thing. Dropped the ball there.

But for things flying at the screen and placing the audience in the body of Thunder as he leaps from branch to branch to window, The House of Magic excites.