Spineless

Nine is a shoddy musical, but that's not its biggest problem. No, the big problem is that director Rob Marshall lacks the courage of his convictions.

Musicals are hardly the most fashionable things on the Hollywood screen of late. Despite the critical and commercial successes of Chicago, Sweeney Todd and even Moulin Rouge, we're still in an age where the teenage boy (or, at least, the studio's view of a certain type of teenage boy) still is the only demographic served by big-budget Hollywood cinema.

So it's great that any musicals get made at all. However it can't be too much like a musical. In Rob Marshall's world, musical numbers are interrupted by dialogue. All musical numbers are presented through the trope of a dream sequence or, at least, an unadventurous theatrical staging. We can't have them as anything interesting. They are also sexualised to the point of banality. You have to make a concession to the boys, after all.

Julie Andrews would be turning in her grave, if she were dead. And this might well just kill her. It says a lot that West End musicals are booming. Singstar is a new way of life to others. People want to see this stuff. I want to see this stuff.

The Cat Returns

The Cat Returns won't transport you through the same rapturous plains as Studio Ghibli's best films such as Spirited Away or Ponyo. But within its perfunctory whimsy and mild charms, lies a film which is, more than occasionally, a fully functional animated delight.

And like most of the studio's films, it brings you a pre-packaged universe of immeasurable imagination. Here, it's the Kingdom of the Cats; this is where our heroine Haru is taken, after performing a good deed for a moggy in distress. After rescuing the cat from what would have surely been death under the wheels of a lorry, she is rewarded by an invitation to a feline alternate reality. Although always a fan of cats since young, she soon is choking on her words as she finds herself in an arranged marriage to cat royalty, and sprouting whiskers of her own.

It's consistently odd, but it doesn't have the sly or nasty edge of the best work out of Ghibli's Hayuzi Miyazaki-directed animation. The gorgeous backdrops of Princess Mononoke are missing, and the characterisation of Howl's Moving Castle isn't here. The ambition is also somewhat tempered, as the movie nestles into a comforting groove of likeable craziness.

But we'd rather have the crags and blemishes of this comforting groove, than the much-furrowed safety of the latest Dreamworks, Pixar-lite creation.