Besides, the plot isn't such a big deal here. Neither are the characters. The real star of The Wild is the fur. Samson the lion boasts more than 6 million photorealistic hair follicles. That's a million more than Aslan had in The Chronicles of Narnia and roughly 6 million more than Simba in the original Lion King. Samson's coat looks so real, you want to reach out and touch it. And when he moves, his mane is absolutely mesmerizing.

Why is it that computer animators are so obsessed with photorealism? Since when do audiences demand fur that looks soft enough to pet or water that looks real enough to drink? Watching Samson steer a tugboat across the Atlantic is no different from that dancing baby on Ally McBeal. It's just plain creepy.

There's certainly a place for CG movies — there had better be, since Hollywood has 13 feature-length CG toons slated for release in 2006 — but storywise, The Wild is the most disappointing studio-level entry so far.

With four people sharing screenplay credit, the blame is split between the brain trusts behind Snow Dogs and the Santa Clause sequels. The director is a former ILM whiz who calls himself ''Spaz,'' and that nickname effectively describes the attention-deficit styling of a story that crudely lifts its best ideas from Finding Nemo (with an insecure lion cub separated from his father) and The Lion King (featuring run-ins with wildebeests and other flatulent jungle animals).

No sooner is a conflict presented than it is resolved in the next shot. The animals need to bust out of the zoo? Cut to the caged critters sneaking out in a Dumpster. Lost in the sewers? Cut to them arriving at the Statue of Liberty. And so on.

Meanwhile, each of the characters looks and behaves as if it was imported from a different dimension. Kiefer Sutherland plays Samson like a deadpan extension of his 24 character, while the silly-acting anaconda (Richard Kind) flaps its mouth like a rubber sock puppet.

Janeane Garofalo is all wrong as the giraffe, whom the animators contort into all manner of weird positions so she can share the frame with pint-size love interest Benny the squirrel (Jim Belushi). It's no easy feat to create a koala no one wants to cuddle, but Nigel is as ugly as he is obnoxious. The animators even abandoned his Australian heritage for a British accent (and bad teeth) so they could miscast Eddie Izzard in the part. Meanwhile, the flamingos are Scottish, the pigeons are Indian and the dung beetles are Swedish. Go figure.

Here is a movie so radically inferior to Madagascar (I couldn't resist the comparison any longer) that parents watching with their kids will identify acutely with the animals' feelings of captivity.

[as featured in The Miami Herald]