QUEST FOR CAMELOT: Animated adventure. Featuring the voices of Jessalyn Gilsig, Cary Elwes, Gary Oldman, Jane Seymour, Pierce Brosnan, Eric Idle, Don Rickles. Songs by David Foster and Carole Bayer Sager. Directed by Frederik Du Chau. (G. 83 minutes. At Bay Area theaters.)
The new animated feature "Quest for Camelot" is a spirited adventure with generous romantic and comic charms. The story of a determined teenage girl's mission to recover the magical sword Excalibur and help save Camelot provides an enchanting twist on the overworked Arthurian legend.
Though no masterpiece, "Quest for Camelot" aims to please a range of ages, with loopy gags, corny romance, an oversized villain and catchy tunes performed by Celine Dion and LeAnn Rimes, among others.
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The G-rated, wisely short production, whose blockish cartoon drawings never quite hit artistic elegance, opens today at Bay Area theaters.
Kayley (voice of Jessalyn Gilsig, singing by Andrea Corr) is a live wire whose knight father was killed years before by a power-hungry fellow knight, Ruber (voice of Gary Oldman), who had been cast out from King Arthur's roundtable.
The vengeful Ruber uses his vicious bird, Griffin (Bronson Pinchot), to steal Excalibur from King Arthur (Pierce Bros nan), but the bird accidentally drops it into a netherworld forest in which clawed branches devour all who venture near.
Kayley sets out to retrieve the sword, and a frustrated Ruber kidnaps her mother, Lady Juliana (Jane Seymour). On her dangerous quest, Kayley meets a young blind man, Garrett (Cary Elwes), who once hoped for round-table knighthood but is now a forest hermit. Garrett helps her face monsters and menacing thickets with his comic sidekicks Devon and Cornwall (Eric Idle and Don Rickles), two heads of a freakish, funny dragon.
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Despite jarring transitions between scenes, "Quest for Camelot" keeps its core kid audience in mind by moving quickly and providing deft interplay between adventure and wackiness. The film, based on Vera Chapman's novel "The King's Damosel," enchants with gorgeous aerial vistas of the English countryside, a graceful sense of architecture and an inviting garden sequence in which Kayley and Garrett first feel attraction. Fine pop-style ballads by David Foster and Carole Bayer Sager underscore the action. "I Stand Alone," performed by Steve Perry and reprised by Bryan White, is a standout, as is the Idle-Rickles comic duet "If I Didn't Have You."
The villain Ruber is a tad too mechanical-looking to engage the dark side, but kids will get the idea. The film offsets his might with a cute bumbling assistant named Bladebeak. "Quest for Camelot" is the first full-length animated feature produced by Warner Bros.
