Arthur and the Invisibles (2006)

  Rob has a lot of weird crap on his server.  I swear he hasn't even seen most of it and I have no idea why he owns it.  Granted, he'll get stuff for me sometimes which I totally appreciate and would never abuse, ahem.

Anyway, this is one of the more random selections.  A little boy named Arthur (Freddie Highmore) must find a way to save his grandparents' farm.  His grandfather had spent a great deal of time in Africa as an engineer and kept a journal full of his adventures.  He disappeared three years prior to the events of this story.  While reading the journal and looking for clues to stop the repossession of the farm, Arthur finds references to a kingdom of tiny, tiny people called the Minimoys and a gift of rubies that a tribe had given his grandfather.  Determined to find the rubies, Arthur deciphers the codes and gets himself transported down to the Minimoy world.  He finds the Princess Selenia (Madonna, although I would have been prepared to swear that she was voiced by Julia Louis-Dreyfus) and her people in fear of a creature called Maltazard or Evil M.  M (David Bowie) rules one of the seven kingdoms from the city of Necropolis and that's where the rubies are.  Selenia, Arthur, and her little brother Betameche (Jimmy Fallon) travel there in order to prevent Evil M from flooding the Minimoy's kingdom.

I was a little stunned at the amount of voice talent in a movie that I had never even heard of.  Besides the ones mentioned, there are appearances from Robert De Niro, Harvey Keitel, Emilio Estevez, Snoop Dogg, Anthony Anderson, Jason Bateman, and Chazz Palminteri.  About a third of the movie is live-action and the rest is CGI.  It's set in Connecticut around the Great Depression and no one in the cast is English except for Freddie Highmore.  They have a throwaway line about him being at boarding school in England, which is retarded since the whole point of the movie is that the family is about to be evicted, but it's for kids so I'll let it go.  Highmore is a decent child actor, even if he was fourteen and not ten when this was filmed.

I'll let that sink in for a minute.  Freddie Highmore is going to be 20 next year.  The Charlie and the Chocolate Factory kid.  I'm going to go kill myself now.
Anyway, the movie isn't a total waste of time.  Worthwhile if you have kids, otherwise interesting for a single viewing.