Quackerz

K-Gr 3—Longway is a duck whose dreams are bigger than his reality. He is the Sun Duck, a creature long prophesied to protect the sun from a monster who wants to steal it, but Longway's father has hidden the truth in an effort to shield Longway. Longway and his tribe are Mandarin ducks, and the film, set in an Asiatic world, plays with the word Mandarin by giving the community karate-style belts, slightly slanted eyes, and a variety of stereotypically "Asian" facial hair, with predictably offensive results. The human characters do not fare much better. Ms. Knout, the slinky villain, is introduced with a long, slow pan as she traces a hand up her body, and she walks with an exaggerated sway to her hips: a strange choice for a movie ostensibly geared toward prepubescent children. (One of her bumbling sidekicks is a large man who can't stop eating.) The language is regrettable, too: characters call one another "stupid," "jerk," and "dummy" over the course of the film. The animation is crisp, and the colors are vivid, but the movie's surface beauty does not make up for its faults.