Christopher-Lee Movie Reviews

Miss Clavell takes her class to visit a toy factory owned by an old friend. But while the old pals chat, the red-haired "smallest one" leaps onto the doll conveyor belt and before one can say "Oh, Madeline!" she is boxed up with the rest of the dolls and shipped off to a toy store. The mother of an ailing girl purchases her to lift her daughter's spirits, which, of course, the amazingly lifelike doll does. Miss Clavell and company track down their missing schoolgirl, leaving the sickly girl even more bereft, until Madeline finds a way to make it up to her. Like the others in this series, this tape is based on Ludwig Bemelmans's book of the same name and features Christopher Plummer narrating Madeline's gentle lesson that people's feelings are more important than playing games. --Kimberly Heinrichs

If Muffy's finishing-school fund is coming up a few bucks short, don't fret. Madeline's Sing Along is a quick, cost-effective substitute, and most 2- to 6-year-olds will find it's loads more fun than teetering around and balancing stacks of books on their heads. Setting examples of proper young-lady behavior on this 12-song collection culled from the Madeline cartoon series are the usual cast of characters: the 11 other little girls who live in the old house in Paris that's covered in vines, the school-marmish Miss Clavel, etc. Here, though, they're more like an anonymous performance cluster than Madeline's bunkmates, singing and dancing their way through a flipbook of summarized lessons. For instance, when the sometimes rascally redhead is cast aside, in a brief opening segment, by a neighbor boy, the French girl group falls in for "We'll Always Be There for You," and after an imbroglio over who'll be the star of an upcoming show, they corral themselves into a chorus line and break into the Broadway-inspired "The Play's the Thing." A disappointingly petite percentage of these songs are catchy (only "Pleased to Meet You," a charmer of a primer on the best way to greet someone new, cries out for an encore), but the issues they tackle--lying on "The Boy Who Cried Wolf" and "One Little Lie Leads to Another," cooperation on "Do the Job Together," and self-esteem on "One Size Fits All" and "Nobody's Better Than Me"--will nonetheless come as music to the ears of parents concerned with cultivating gentleness. Beginning readers and grown-up viewers who take the singing part of singalongs seriously will benefit from the bouncing words at the bottom of the screen. --Tammy La Gorce

If Muffy's finishing-school fund is coming up a few bucks short, don't fret. Madeline's Sing Along is a quick, cost-effective substitute, and most 2- to 6-year-olds will find it's loads more fun than teetering around and balancing stacks of books on their heads. Setting examples of proper young-lady behavior on this 12-song collection culled from the Madeline cartoon series are the usual cast of characters: the 11 other little girls who live in the old house in Paris that's covered in vines, the school-marmish Miss Clavel, etc. Here, though, they're more like an anonymous performance cluster than Madeline's bunkmates, singing and dancing their way through a flipbook of summarized lessons. For instance, when the sometimes rascally redhead is cast aside, in a brief opening segment, by a neighbor boy, the French girl group falls in for "We'll Always Be There for You," and after an imbroglio over who'll be the star of an upcoming show, they corral themselves into a chorus line and break into the Broadway-inspired "The Play's the Thing." A disappointingly petite percentage of these songs are catchy (only "Pleased to Meet You," a charmer of a primer on the best way to greet someone new, cries out for an encore), but the issues they tackle--lying on "The Boy Who Cried Wolf" and "One Little Lie Leads to Another," cooperation on "Do the Job Together," and self-esteem on "One Size Fits All" and "Nobody's Better Than Me"--will nonetheless come as music to the ears of parents concerned with cultivating gentleness. Beginning readers and grown-up viewers who take the singing part of singalongs seriously will benefit from the bouncing words at the bottom of the screen. --Tammy La Gorce