MOVIE REVIEWS : A Dangerous Game Shows It’s a Jungle Out There

If you’ve seen “Toy Story,” you know how computer animation can be used to charm the socks off of young children. If you see “Jumanji,” you’ll learn how it can be used to scare the hell out of them.

“Jumanji,” adapted from Chris Van Allsburg’s children’s book by director Joe Johnston (“The Rocketeer”) and starring a very subdued Robin Williams, is filled with magnificent, computer-animated fantasy images. But virtually every one of them exists as a lethal threat to the people, primarily children, populating the story. It’s like a spectacular Halloween prank being played on the audience, with gull-size mosquitoes, roaring lions, snapping monkeys, stampeding elephants, flesh-eating plants and monsoon storms thundering off the screen.

Something bad happened on the way from the book to the movie. Van Allsburg’s award-winning story is a fanciful adventure about an ancient board game whose consequences are real. The players roll the dice, and if they land on, say, that African stampede, so many elephants, giraffes and rhinos come crashing through their wall.

But there is a huge difference between suggesting those events, even with Van Allsburg’s detailed illustrations, than having it played out in a continuing series of harrowing, noisy adventures with real children in seeming peril. Obviously, the filmmakers were encouraged by the success of “Jurassic Park,” but even Steven Spielberg said he wouldn’t take his kids to see it. How “Jumanji” got away with a PG rating is something ratings architect Jack Valenti may have to explain to some perturbed parents.

“Jumanji” opens in the small New England town of Bantford in 1969, with the discovery by 12-year-old Alan Parrish (Adam Hann-Byrd) of a board game in a rusty old trunk dug up next to his father’s shoe factory. When Alan and his friend Sarah (Laura Bell Bundy) start to play the game, he immediately disappears and she is chased down the street by a colony of giant African bats.

Cut to Bantford, 1995, long after Alan’s parents have spent their fortune looking for him, and died broken-hearted, and Sarah (Bonnie Hunt) has become the town’s eccentric outcast. A new family has just moved into Alan’s abandoned and dilapidated home, and when some ominous drumbeats lead the two kids to his Jumanji game in the attic, it’s show time again.

The sick joke of Jumanji is that once you start the game, you cannot stop until someone wins, meaning that the game Alan and Sarah started in 1969 is still open. When the new players Judy (Kirsten Dunst) and Peter (Bradley Pierce) roll the dice, inadvertently bringing an adult version of Alan (Williams) back from exile in the board’s other-world jungle, they have to find Sarah and take turns rolling for horrors.

Johnston and his writers attempt a sort of “It’s a Wonderful Life”-fulfillment ending, where lessons are learned and tragedies undone, and cap it with an all’s-well ending in storybook (alliterates with Bedford Falls) Bantford.

It’s hardly the same. George Bailey was a confused man forced by an angel to look back and find the good in an eventful life. Alan Parrish is a kid in a man’s middle-age body, wrestling crocodiles and running from a big-game hunter (Jonathan Hyde) who bears a striking resemblance to the father whose love he never had.

Resolving the father-son conflict is a bit too Freudian for kids, and the sanguine ending, in any event, won’t erase whatever emotional trauma they endure getting there. As much as you may admire the computer’s creations, the adventures themselves make you squirm more out of impatience than anything you’d describe as a thrill.

Using both computer animation from Industrial Light & Magic and animatronics by Amalgamated Dynamics, “Jumanji” creates a hostile world of heightened realism. The animals don’t exactly look real--the monkeys’ faces are too humanly expressive, the lion’s mouth a bit too large and hungry--but they’re close enough to fool anyone peering through their fingers, and they just keep coming, one after another, with little relief from the film’s clumsy efforts at humor.

Certainly, Williams, in his most earnest, face-screwing mode, does nothing to lighten the load. He looks scared, and you can’t blame him. It feels as if the game, and the movie, are never going to end.

* MPAA rating: PG, for menacing fantasy action and some mild language. Times guidelines: as intense as “Jurassic Park,” and more often.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

‘Jumanji’

Robin Williams: Alan Parrish

Bonnie Hunt: Sarah

Kirsten Dunst: Judy

Bradley Pierce: Peter

Jonathan Hyde: Sam Parish/Van Pelt

An Interscope Communications/Teitler Film Production. Director Joe Johnston. Producers Scott Kroopf and William Teitler. Screenplay by Jonathan Hensleigh, Greg Taylor, Jim Strain. Based on the children’s book by Chris Van Allsburg. Cinematographer Thomas Ackerman. Editor Robert Dalva. Music James Horner. Production designer James Bissell. Art directors David Wilson, Glen Pearson. Set decorators Tedd Kuchera, Cynthia T. Lewis. Running time: 1 hour, 44 minutes.

* In general release throughout Southern California.