Movie Review: Hey Arnold - The Movie

By Donna Schwartz Mills

• Distributor: Paramount Pictures
• MPAA Rating: PG (for "some thematic elements")
• Mom Rating: 2 out of 5
• Kid Rating: 4 out of 5
• Voice Cast: Spencer Klein, Francesca Marie Smith, Jamil Smith, Dan Castellaneta, Tress MacNeille, Paul Sorvino, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Christopher Lloyd

I confess: I like "Hey Arnold," the cartoon series on Nickelodeon. I like the fact that Arnold lives in a gritty, urban neighborhood in a boarding house owned by his eccentric grandparents. I like his friends. I like the way Helga bullies him to disguise the fact that she secretly loves him. I love some of the clever episodes, like the one where the producers pay homage to Loony Tunes and do the whole thing as an opera. I especially like Arnold, who is the kind of kid I like my daughter to choose as a friend: cheerful, smart and nice.

It's just too bad the folks at Nick didn't just run this as a long episode on TV, which is what they had planned to do in the first place. The popularity of the series - probably coupled with the success they enjoyed with the two "Rugrats" movies - inspired them to release this overlong cartoon episode as a feature film.

Unfortunately, it doesn't play like one in the theater. For one thing, the animation (which looks perfectly fine on TV) suffers from being blown up to theater screen proportions. The story seems to drag (after all, an episode of Arnold runs less than 15 minutes, while this movie fills a time period of nearly an hour and a half) and you can almost tell where the commercials were supposed to go.

That is not to say that this movie is without all the charms of the TV series. When a big bucks developer threatens to bulldoze the neighborhood, the grownups all cave in -- but not Arnold, who leads the fight to save their block. When it looks like all is lost, Arnold refuses to give up - and through his resourcefulness (and a little high tech help from some sympathetic adults), he proves that you CAN fight City Hall.

They've been promoting the movie on Nick with teasers indicating that Helga would finally confess her feelings to Arnold, and this is one of the reasons my daughter and her friend really wanted to see this movie. It was rumored that Helga would even give Arnold a kiss. The rumors are true, and you could hear the kids in the audience give out a collective "eeeuwww..." But when it was over and I asked the girls which part of the film they liked best, the overwhelming favorite was the kiss. Ironically, this was my favorite scene too, generating genuine laughter throughout the theater. I just wish the writers had spent more time with scenes exploring the kids' relationships with one another.

Overall, the kids liked this movie a lot more than I did. So did my husband, who did not come to the theater with any knowledge of the TV show. There are no overtly scary villains, no questionable language or other elements I could think of that would prevent my taking a very young child to this movie. So I could think of a lot worse ways to stay cool for a couple of hours on a hot summer day...

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