Little Johnny: The Movie

Having made Kevin 'Bloody' Wilson's Christmas album pretty much compulsory annual listening I was curious as to what would happen ought said inspiration result in a cartoon. Unfamiliar myself with the whole 'Little Johnny' series of jokes, I kind of went on into this one based solely on an idea of Wilson's humour. There I was not disappointed. If you want to see dunny gags and schoolchildren using the F-word inappropriately this is going to be quite (and repeatedly) rewarding and on this basis alone I wholeheartedly recommend it.

That said, it's a bit long. To meet feature length, they really pushed their 80 minutes, but a 45 minute 'special' on one of those FoxTel channels that doesn't mind the foul language might have been a better bet (and maybe better funded!). A series of amusing but non-topical jokes and some antics involving a rooster pad the time but detract (my partner fell asleep) from the core premise of the work: Johnny wants to win a go-cart race to get the girl.

That last bit does go entertainingly well besides the maddening insistence to apply Motion- rendered DOF to animation. I like my cartoons depth-of-field free.

There's a few tasteless but yet chronically appropriate ethnic jokes (and I think one gay one) and it makes families from the 1960's a bit less spank-happy when they were (I grew up in the late 1970's and had my hide tanned seemingly daily for crying out loud!) but generally, it was a fun if perhaps unnecessarily extended ride, and I give it 7 out of 10.