ANIMATION; 1hr 28min
VOICES BY: Seth Green, Dan Fogler, Joan Cusack
Mother ship: from left, Gribble and Milo
The title does it no favours but when it takes off, Mars Needs Moms is quite the performance-captured trip. One minute, Milo (voiced by Green) is a regular boy-brat, malingering over chores, refusing to eat his broccoli and squabbling with his mom (Cusack). The next, Mom has been kidnapped by order of a Martian crone (Mindy Sterling) who could be ET’s evil nana and likes the tough-love cut of her gib.
After stowing away on the spaceship, Milo is on a rescue mission with the scattershot assistance of a strange man (Fogler as Gribble) who has been marooned on the Red Planet for too long and a renegade Martian (Elisabeth Harnois) with a hippie-chick vocab. Does one small boy stand a ghost of a chance in the soulless enormity of a militaristic subterranean unknown? For sure — and what’s more, he kept a cinema of small kids as happy as clams on his inventively imagined interplanetary travels.
