Dir: Steve Hudson. With the voices of: Asa Butterfield, Joel Fry, Rob Brydon, Alison Steadman. 92 mins. Cert: U
Perhaps the most noteworthy aspect of this middling Brit-headed, European-financed, Indian-manufactured digimation is the radical change of career trajectory it represents for its pinballing director Steve Hudson. Hudson broke through with 2006’s Loachian social drama True North, a well-received migrant movie starring Peter Mullan; having subsequently witnessed how the other half lives while helming episodes of primetime TV’s Cranford, he now pivots to pixels with a big-screen adaptation of Guy Bass’s kid-lit books. His latest does feel like a tentative first step into a heavily crowded field, sutured together from ideas and images previously encountered in far more confident and accomplished entertainments.
Bass’s eponymous hero is rendered here as a boy with Bowie-esque polychromatic eyes, a baseball-like head and the voice of Asa Butterfield; his home is a castle overlooking smalltown Grubbers Nubbin, where a mad professor (Rob Brydon) carries out Frankenstinian experiments. If the lead character design is solid – accompanying adults may wind up knitting replicas of Stitch Head’s onesie – the surrounding menagerie seems a bit too Pixar for comfort: Stitch’s furry cyclops pal Creature (Joel Fry) is so conspicuously a hybrid of Monsters, Inc.’s Mike and Sully you’re amazed legal letters haven’t been exchanged. Once this pair abscond to join a travelling freakshow, Stitch Head ventures a rather melancholy and misshapen showbiz story – that of a boy who, much like the film, sorely wants to be loved.
This viewer emerged feeling a little sorry for it: in cinemas, Stitch Head is being preceded by trailers for Pixar and Sony’s latest whizzbang endeavours, armed with the full box of audiovisual fireworks. By contrast, dead air swirls around Hudson’s minor-celebrity voicecast; his backgrounds are more detailed and persuasive than the script. With its free-floating, slightly macabre imagery, the whole suggests a watered-down Saturday morning kids’ club variant of 1993’s The Secret Adventures of Tom Thumb, undertaken by Bristol’s bolexbrothers in their guise as Aardman’s dark side. It’s one to test on your children rather than treat them to, certainly: sensitive youngsters may run screaming, while their elders may develop that glazed look that indicates they’ve sat through much of this before.
Stitch Head opens in cinemas nationwide from Friday.
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