With decent family films fairly thin on the ground this half term, this BFI-supported tour of seven remastered episodes of the 1999 BBC animated series is almost certainly the best kid-friendly cinema option of the week. Directed by Neville Astley and Mark Baker, who went on to create Peppa Pig and Ben & Holly’s Little Kingdom, The Big Knights is the rambunctuously funny tale of two oversized brothers, Sir Boris (David Rintoul) and Sir Morris (Brian Blessed).
Blundering and blusterous, but endearingly well-meaning, the Knights crash though a world of yore, accompanied by their armour-clad pets, Sir Horace the dog and Sir Doris the hamster. It’s a slyly parent-friendly world, constantly threatened by ‘unexpected cataclysmic events’, populated by vampires, witches, brilliant but dangerously insane scientists and a cat called Merkin. The naïve animation style is familiar from later projects, but there’s a refreshing irreverence and playfulness to the humour here which was rather diluted in the exploits of Peppa and family. Look out for the reference to Roger Corman’s The Pit and the Pendulum.
