The Amazing Maurice: Starry vocal cast lift fitfully funny animated tale

The Amazing Maurice (PG, 93mins) Directed by Toby Genkel and Florian Westermann ***

“Nibbling here, napping there, they widdle on your tableware. You try to poison, trap and shoot them, race and chase and stomp and boot them.”

With such impressive patter and penchant for a song-and-dance number, felonious feline Maurice (Hugh Laurie) has made a career – and a fortune – out of ridding towns of rats.

It helps that, as well as handy piper Keith (Himesh Patel), he has his own rodent collective ready and willing to play their part in rapid infestation and hasty departure.

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Although, lately, some have been beginning to question the efficacy and ethics of their vocation. Sure, they might have been blessed with the ability to talk – thanks to eating rubbish from their original home in a magical wizard’s dump – but there’s an increasing feeling that their voices aren’t being heard by Maurice. They feel no closer to the island paradise of Furry Bottom he promised (a place where nothing truly bad ever happens and animals wear clothes), the one featured in their “sacred text” – children’s book Mr Bunsy Has An Adventure – than when they first met.

But, after successfully quelling their latest half-hearted rebellion, Maurice encounters an even greater threat to his “deluxe retirement plan” at their next stop.

Initially, Bad Blintz seems like the perfect target – a well-to-do market town apparently currently free of pest problems. And yet, despite the seeming lack of resident rodents, food keeps disappearing and a shadowy rat catching business boss (David Thewlis) appears to be one of Bad Blintz’s most powerful people.

“This smells like a mystery,” muses Maurice, although his mood quickly darkens when his furry friends begin to vanish without a trace. Now, it’s up to him, Keith and the town’s mayor’s book-loving daughter Malicia (Emilia Clarke) to get to the bottom of what’s going on – before it’s too late.

A chunkily-animated, cheery version of the late Sir Terry Pratchett’s award-winning 2001 Pied Piper of Hamelin-riff The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents (a book that doubled as the 28th volume of his long-running, beloved Discworld series), directors Toby Genkel (Two by Two: Overboard) and Florian Westermann’s film works best when it leans into the author’s more surreal and post-modern story-deconstruction elements.

Doubling as our narrator, Clarke’s sparky Malicia is constantly breaking the fourth-wall and breaking down what’s happening in terms of “narrative tension”, “comic relief” and “foreshadowing”.

“In many ways, I don’t think the plot of this adventure has been properly structured,” she laments, the adults in the audience perhaps wishing she wasn’t quite so on the money. For strip away the starry vocal cast (that also includes Hugh Bonneville, David Tennant, Rob Brydon and Gemma Arterton), the in-jokes for Pratchett fans and a clever pastiche of Beatrix Potter’s oeuvre and there’s a sense of déjà vu and The Secret of Nimh-meets-Flushed Away about the action (although, at one point, things segue into an area that will seem eerily familiar to anyone who has just seen Puss in Boots: The Last Wish).

And while Maurice himself suggests that “you should check the title, if you harbour any doubts about who this story is really about”, he sometimes feels like a peripheral player to the human and rodent quests.

Still, it’s hard to truly dislike any movie whose characters include Dangerous Beans, Special Offer, Delicious in Brine and Mr Clicky.

The Amazing Maurice will begin screening in New Zealand cinemas from January 12.