One can only wonder at how the late Dennis Potter envisioned Roald Dahl, because his is no longer among the names on the screenplay for this big screener. Would the orphaned James Henry Trotter have cultivated a disfiguring skin disease from spying on his aunts at it in the woods? It might have backboned a movie that, for all its charm and ingenuity, ultimately lacks the spice of Selick's last, the fabulous A Nightmare Before Christmas.

When a rhinoceros does for his parents, James is sent to live with odious aunts Spiker (Joanna Lumley) and Sponge (Miriam Margoyles), dreaming of the day he will visit the New York his father told him about. Then a bag of magical crocodile tongues grows a gigantic peach on a tree in the dead garden and James escapes his cruel relatives by crawling inside, encountering the insects he called friends grown to full-size. Together they use the miraculous fruit to flee for America.

With a nod to his audience, gloop and darkness always won out over cute and whimsy with Dahl - something Nic Roeg realised with his underrated reading of The Witches, and Selick too - albeit filtered through producer Tim Burton - with Nightmare. This latest hints at something like in Lumley's ghastly make-up, in the boiling clouds that birth-up the rhino, but the rest is just too damn nice.

Likewise, when it comes to the score Randy Newman proves himself no Danny Elfman. The early 'My Name Is James' rings warning bells - colourless, Disneyesque - and sets the tone. Nothing here sticks in the mind like Elfman's bouncy, barbed Nightmare songs. We look for consolation in the relative sparseness of Newman's efforts.

The vocal talent otherwise is strong and largely well used. Paul Terry is a more than adequate James, likewise Simon Callow's Grasshopper and Susan Sarandon's sexy French spider. But Richard Dreyfuss' mouthy, hyperactive Centipede is grating; his resurrection from drowning mid-picture is a real disappointment. Of all the high pressure human talent, though, it's David Thewlis' earthy Mancunian Earthworm that takes the honours. Myopic and cowardly, it's a peach.

The animation, as expected, is flawless, the majority in the same 3-D technique as Selick's first picture, but here and there intercutting shadowplay, 2-D Gilliam-esque cut-out, and computer generation for the scary, whizzy-toothed Ur-shark. It's all beautifully done, but shows up the lengthy live action bookends as largely redundant. The opening is heavily stylised and Lumley striking as Spiker (Margolyes, surprisingly, is rather bland), but the New York coda is ugly and, some nice interaction aside, as flat as amateur panto.

There is a harder picture in here somewhere that occasionally peeks out of the mush: Earthworm rapping about his brother getting sliced in half; the lascivious Spider tying James into his web bed for the night; the pirate ghosts in the submerged ship-graveyard (look for a Jack Skellington cameo). But it's noticeable that Dahl's rhino is no longer just a rhino but also the physical manifestation of James' insecurity. Uncle Walt would be proud. Ultimately the film is what Nightmare and The Witches were not - a kiddie pic that, some admirable technical stuff aside, is really just for kiddies.