MARS NEEDS MOMS (Simon Wells). 88 minutes. Opens Friday (March 11). See listings. Rating: NNN
Eat your broccoli, take out the garbage and, above all, don’t talk back to your mother.
Those are the valuable life lessons that come through in vivid, bright 3-D in Simon Wells’s Mars Needs Moms, an oddly affecting if predictable animated film based on the Berkeley Breathed book.
After his strict mom (voiced by Joan Cusack) is abducted by aliens, Milo (“acted” by Seth Green but voiced by Seth Dusky) hitches a ride on the same spaceship and lands on the red planet, where he soon meets up with Gribble (Dan Fogler), a 20-something tech-savvy slob who’s stuck in the 1980s, and Ki (Elisabeth Harnois), a Martian who’s found a colourful way to rebel against her militant upbringing.
The trio soon set out to rescue Milo’s mom, but not before an exposition-heavy middle section where we learn how and why Martians need earthling moms to keep their female-led society going.
Standing in their way is a shrieking old shrew called the Supervisor (Mindy Sterling), who resembles a combination of E.T. and Meryl Streep’s Devil Wears Prada character.
The look of the film borrows heavily from WALL-E’s junkyard universe and Star Wars’ spaceship corridors – there are even Storm Trooper-like characters, albeit in uniforms that accentuate their shapely backsides.
Producer Robert Zemeckis’s animation studio, which gave us The Polar Express and Beowulf, has got slightly better at rendering human faces, but there’s still something creepy and bloodless about their skin.
But the characters’ expressions and voice work are lovely, especially leading up to the film’s climax. And there’s something satisfying about seeing a movie that celebrates the tireless efforts of moms, who’ll likely be lugging their brats to see this en masse during March break.
