Posted: Sun., Dec. 31, 1978, 11:00pm PT

The Water Babies

(UK)

By Variety Staff

Pethurst/Production Associates/Ariadne. Director Lionel Jeffries; Producer Peter Shaw; Screenplay Michael Robson; Camera Ted Scaife; Editor Peter Weatherley; Music Phil Coulter, Bill Martin; Art Director Herbert Westbrook

James Mason Billie Whitelaw Bernard Cribbins Joan Greenwood David Tomlinson Samantha Gates

The musical screen version of The Water Babies, Charles Kingsley's children's novel, tells the story of innocence-versus-evil more or less straight. The slim $2 million production budget combines live action footage and - for the underwater sequences - animation.

Screenplay plots the adventures of a 12-year-old apprentice chimneysweep, wrongly accused of theft, who dives into a pool to escape his pursuers. Trapped below the surface, he meets a succession of human stereotypes, jokily animated as underwater creatures, and has a battle to free the water babies, who normally inhabit an eternal playground in mid-ocean but have been captured by a shark and an electric eel.

Animated sequences by Cuthbert Cartoons in London, and movement synchronized by Miroslaw Kijowicz in Poland to a pre-recorded soundtrack, are garish but effective.

(Color) Available on VHS. Extract of a review from 1979. Running time: 93 MIN.