There was a time when a film's being comptuter-animated almost ensured it would be good. The process was so time-consuming that no one would bother putting the effort into it if they didn't have a solid story in place. Unfortunately, as computer animation gets easier, the films are getting crappier. Witness "Happily N'Ever After," a deeply lame attempt at fairy-tale spoofery in which the characters look and move like state-of-the-art video-game figures circa 1985.

It's set in a place called Fairy Tale Land. "Corny, I know," says the narrator, "but we had to call it something, and Canada was taken."

That's as funny as the jokes get, folks, so settle in.

In Fairy Tale Land dwell all the familiar fairy tale characters, their stories apparently repeating themselves over and over again, though they are not aware of this. Everything is monitored by a wizard (George Carlin) from the upper room of a castle, where he makes sure the good-and-evil scale (it's an actual scale) remains balanced in such a way as to ensure happy endings every time. His two bumbling unclassified-mammal assistants, Munk (Wallace Shawn) and Mambo (Andy Dick), are on hand to, I don't know, make sure stuff gets screwed up.

The wizard goes on vacation, whereupon Cinderella's wicked stepmother, Frieda (Sigourney Weaver) immediately seizes control of the upper room from Munk and Mambo, tilts the scales to "evil," and sits back and laughs as suddenly Cinderella's godmother-enhanced ball gown turns into tattered rags several hours early, right in front of the prince, ruining all her chances with him.

Cinderella -- they just call her Ella -- is voiced by Sarah Michelle Gellar, whose husband Freddie Prinze Jr. provides the voice of ... Rick. Who's Rick? Rick is the prince's royal dishwasher. The prince himself (Patrick Warburton) is a vain idiot, while Rick is the true gentleman who deserves Ella's love, if only she could get the prince stars out of her eyes, blah blah blah. I think the message is that anyone can be a hero, regardless of their station in life, or some kind of crap like that.

Meanwhile, Frieda, not content with turning all the endings sour ("Happy endings are soooo yesterday!" she declares in one of her screenwriter-trying-to-sound-hip moments), also summons all the villains she can find. Ogres, giants, trolls, and wolves gather at the castle to take over the kingdom and do as they please.

(The fact that "Shrek the Third" has since done the same thing only better makes "Happily N'Ever After" seem even less original on DVD.)

None of the vocal performances are anything special, but they aren't given anything interesting to say, either. The dialogue is painfully unfunny, the story the very picture of simple-minded thinking. ("What if the fairy tales DIDN'T end happily ever after?!! No one's ever thought of that before!")

About the only element of the film that I laughed at was the introduction of the seven dwarfs as Southern redneck weapons-stockpilers. And then that angle ran into a dead end fairly quickly, and the joy was lost.

Directed by third-tier animator Paul Bolger ("Cool World," "The Land Before Time") from Robert Moreland's embarrassingly amateurish script, "Happily N'Ever After" is a perfect blend of strained jokes, unoriginal ideas, and cheap animation. Your children, no matter how awful they may be, deserve better than this.


THE DVD

The DVD menus are voiced by Andy Dick and Wallace Shawn as Mambo and Munk, every bit as annoying as they are in the movie. Before you can do anything, you have to choose whether you prefer good or evil, and your choice takes you to one menu or the other. Except the menus are exactly the same either way! It's just an extra "fun" hoop to jump through.

There is an alternate soundtrack in Spanish, as well as optional English and Spanish subtitles.

VIDEO: Anamorphic widescreen (1.85:1), and a suitably pristine picture, too. The colors are deep and rich, as they should be.

AUDIO: The Dolby Digital 5.1 mix is sharp and clear. Being a cartoon, it has a lot of goofy sound effects and music cues, and they fill the ears nicely.

EXTRAS: Director Paul Bolger provides a commentary. He speaks often of how the film evolved over time, starting as a dark, dour German enterprise and winding up as the slap-happy piece of garbage you see before you (my words, not his). I have to assume that whatever the original "vision" was, it was ultimately discarded.

Featurettes:

"Journey of the Characters in the Enchanted Forest" (16:13 total) has four sub-chapters dealing with the initial sketching of the characters, the designing, and the technical aspects. Director Paul Bolger addresses us in his charming Irish lilt, which makes everything seem a little more interesting.

"From Storyboard to Fairy Tale: A Comparison" (2:57 total) is just what it sounds like: side-by-side views of the storyboard, layout, animation, and final rendering of three select moments from the film. If you're interested in the nuts-and-bolts of animation, it's pretty good.

"Creating the Happily Story: Bringing N'Ever After to Life" devotes two minutes to each of several people involved with the film talking about their role. It's a little sad to see respected heavyweights like Sigourney Weaver and George Carlin talk about how much they liked the script, and what a good movie it turned out to be -- because either they're being sincere and our idols have crappy taste, or they're shilling and our idols have sold out.

Also, screenwriter Robert Moreland, while speaking of his admiration for the classic fairy tales, refers to their authors, the Grimm brothers, as "the Grimms brothers." Three times.

There are seven deleted scenes (7:00 total) that offer slightly different versions of scenes that appeared in the film. They are neither better nor worse, merely different.

An alternate ending (2:14) is a slightly different version of the film's real ending, with nothing about the outcome changed. It's really just another deleted scene, not a true "alternate ending."

"Department of Fairy Tale Security" is for the kids, offering five cute little fairy-tale-related games that the li'l tykes can play.

Finally, there are trailers for several other kids' DVDs. The theatrical trailer for "Happily N'Ever After" is not to be found.


IN SUMMARY

The film was dumped by Lionsgate into theaters on Jan. 5 -- traditionally one of the least-attended movie weekends of the year. Clearly they didn't have much faith in it, and with good reason. It's bad. Not "bad, but OK for kids," but flat-out bad, bad for everyone. The extras are pretty good, but so what? A bad movie is a bad movie, no matter how you adorn it.