Mouse and the Motorcycle, The (DVD)

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The emotional high point comes when the little boy develops a high fever and there's no "Temp Quit" to be found. That's when Ralph goes into action, convinced he's seen some errant medication on the floor of the hotel somewhere. The animation is the weak link. It looks like some of the stuff Ray Harryhausen did when he was first trying to get a handle on stop-motion. As I said, Beverly Cleary deserved better.

Video:
Both the feature film and the bonus film show their age. Colors are faded, and there's as much grain in them as some of those health movies they made us watch in the classroom on projectors, before VHS tapes and DVDs took over. As I said, they look a lot older than films made in the Eighties.

Audio:
The audio appears to be a Dolby Digital Mono, and yes, it too has the kind of rawness you get when you see an old video in the schools. There's a tonal flatness to both films, though thankfully the level of distortion is minimal.

Extras:
The bonus story-on-film is "Wee Gillis," based on a book by Munro Leaf, which children may actually like better than the feature film. It's a pleasing little tale about a Scottish lad who has two uncles: one, a farmer who lives in the lowlands and herds long-haired cows, and the other a hunter who lives in the highlands and stalks the deer. Wee Gillis takes turns spending time living with each of his relations, learning how to be a lowlander and a highlander. The end of the movie finds Wee Gillis with a dilemma. His uncles first ask him to make up his mind what life he wants for himself, having tasted both, but then it escalates into an argument that's so loud it can be heard in both the lowlands and the highlands. The resolution presents itself when Wee Gillis, using skills learned from both uncles, is able to inflate the bag of a giant bagpipe that no one else can fill, and that leads him to choose piper as his vocation. It's a simple fable that deals with choices and learning situations that children will be able to identify with, and children today are as fascinated with the lives of children in other countries as they've always been. So this non-animated Churchill film gets my vote as the better of the two.

Bottom Line:
I've seen much better videos in the Weston Woods/ Scholastic Video Collection. "The Mouse and the Motorcycle" has such terrible animation that children today will have to look past it to get any enjoyment.

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