Size really doesn’t matter in this nonsensical kids’ animation reimagining Gulliver’s Travels. Because according to its version of Swift’s 18th-century satire, although Lemuel Gulliver did once visit a land called Lilliput, the people there were not in fact very small. However, after he left, the Lilliputian king – a right royal nincompoop – decreed that Gulliver was a giant. So when he returns to Lilliput as a man of average stature he is arrested as an imposter. Which makes zero sense and the movie only gets sillier from there.
Wayne Grayson voices Gulliver, a silver-tongued smarmy swashbuckler who sails the seas indulging in a bit of light plundering. One day he gets word from his mates on the island of Lilliput – who he once helped out of a jam – that they are under threat from an armada launched by neighbouring Blefuscu. So Gulliver rushes to Lilliput where he is sentenced to death for passing himself off as the Great Gulliver (since he left legend has rewritten him as a man mountain). Like I said, the plot is completely witless.
Meanwhile on Lilliput, time has been running at warp speed since Gulliver last visited, following an order by the king introducing “year days”, where all 365 days pass in a day. Quite how the mechanics of this work is never explained. But what it means is that while Gulliver has been gone for little over 12 months, in Lilliputian years four decades have passed. It’s maddeningly stupid.
The biggest shame here is that Jonathan Swift’s story, like George Orwell’s Animal Farm, is gateway satire for kids, so easily adaptable to little laughs. Instead, six-year-olds are lumbered with this subpar knockabout gibberish, which has virtually nothing in common with the original other than the name of its hero. It’s not even as if the movie is much to look at either, with the plasticky pasteurised feel that ruins children’s television. The characters’ faces run the gamut of three or four emotions, and they move like marionette puppets.
Gulliver Returns is released on 27 December on digital platforms.
