The feature film spin-off from a South Korean animated children’s television series, this excruciatingly winsome underdog – or underpenguin – tale is not an obvious sell to a British audience. Pororo the Penguin and his friends (a polar bear, a bird, an arctic fox, a non-specific pink creature and some kind of dinosaur) will appeal mainly to the very youngest section of the audience, if that.
The animation is plump, cuddly and candy-coloured. The voices are shrill. The plot is as thin as the polar ice cap after a heatwave. Pororo inadvertently causes a cargo plane to crash. Piloting it are a pair of delusional turtles who claim to be super-sleigh racers. Pororo and his chums co-opt turtle Toto (Rob Schneider) into giving them sleigh-racing lessons. But when Team Pororo arrive at the big competition with their lollipop-powered sleigh, they realise that the turtles are frauds and that the nasty bears are the team to beat. It’s painfully twee.
