Whoa there, horsey. Racing Stripes blends live action and animatronix for a narrative about a zebra who wants to be a racehorse trapped in a movie that wants to be Babe. It’s nowhere near, I’m afraid, belonging instead to a genus that includes Ice Age or Shark’s Tale - you know, family features seemingly designed to help the Pixar people cackle themselves to sleep on mattresses stuffed with thousand dollar bills.
Admittedly, it’s not all dreadful. Ignoring Snoop Dogg’s uncharacteristically lazy-ass turn as an underwritten bloodhound (if I didn’t know better I’d swear the Dogg was wasted), there are decent vocal performances from Dustin Hoffman as a curmudgeonly Shetland pony and Mandy Moore as a foxy filly. My inner gymkhana girl found the stripy protagonist, voiced by Frankie Muniz, especially cute, while his bond with teenage owner, Channing (Panettiere, one of the film’s corporeal actors), is very Charlotte’s Web.
But unlike E.B. White’s tear-jerking fable, or indeed Babe, Racing Stripes isn’t out to make you feel all gooey inside, preferring scatology and fall-on-arse sight gags to charm. In one of the movie’s more sophisticated moments, a fly, voiced by David Spade, presumably in training for his next life, falls in a pile of shit. Sigh. Kids may lap this stuff up, but accompanying adults are more likely to feel it approximates death by a thousand butts.
Mercifully, the incongruous landscape distracted me from most of the movie’s more anally fixated moments. Though officially set in the thoroughbred haven of Kentucky, Racing Stripes was largely shot on location in South Africa and the exotic backdrop couldn’t look less mid-western if an elephant or Eugene Terreblanche came galloping over the horizon.
It’s enough to have you inquiring whether they shoot zebras, don’t they?

84mins. Cert PG. Opens February 4th.