Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa

THE TIME may finally have come to utter the following contentious words: Toy Storyhas a lot to answer for.

No sane person would doubt the brilliance of that Pixar film and, for a few years at least, the studio and its competitors worked hard to expand the possibilities of digital animation. But. in recent years, while Pixar has continued to excel, the second division has fallen back on endless retreads of that original vision.

Assemble a bunch of single- adjective fish, bugs, toys or animals. Knock together some story that - allegorically or not - has to do with fathers and their insecure sons. Propel the gang into the sort of peril that can only be counteracted by shaking your anthropomorphic butt to some funky hit from the 1970s. You know what we're talking about.

Madagascar 2is far from being the worst film in its genre. (It will, we hope, be a while before an animated film stinks as badly as did Shark Tale.) The backgrounds are rather beautiful, the anarchic penguins are still very funny, and most of the voice-work passes muster. But a pall of laziness hangs over the enterprise like suffocating smog. As in too many sequels, it just flings together a clutter of half-baked ideas and trusts that the structure will take care of itself.

For the record, the film finds the four bickering animals - formerly residents of Central Park Zoo - fleeing Madagascar in a rickety plane and crash-landing in an African wildlife reservation.

The following stuff then happens: Alex the lion meets his dad; the penguins have a labour dispute with the monkeys; Sacha Baron Cohen's amusing lemur encounters a volcano; the hippo gets seduced by a member of her species who talks like Barry White; that stunningly unamusing old lady from the first film arrives in a bus with some fellow New Yorkers.

And so on. Some of it works. Some of it doesn't. But, even at its funniest, the film never feels like anything more than a perfunctory retread.

We repeat: Toy Storyhas a lot to answer for.

Directed by Eric Darnell and Tom McGrath. Voices of Ben Stiller, Chris Rock, David Schwimmer, Jada Pinkett Smith, Sacha Baron Cohen, Cedric the Entertainer, Alec Baldwin, Bernie Mac, Andy Richter G cert, gen release, 89 min **