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BY MAGGIE SCOTT
For years there was only one king of the hill in the animation world: Disney. There’s still one king of the hill in the animation world: Disney/Pixar, with zowie award-winners like Wall-E , Ratatouille, and The Incredibles, but there are several competent contenders scrambling to be the king’s attendants, like DreamWorks Animation.

Their latest creation, Monsters vs. Aliens has that life-like graphic precision we’ve gotten almost too used to through numerous eye-popping productions since the revolution in computer generated imaging captured the movie-going public’s imagination.

Animation’s capabilities make it possible to bring an endless array of endlessly original concepts to life. So, it’s a bit of a let-down to get a been-there-done-that feeling from this work by directors Rob Letterman and Conrad Vernon (whose other films include Shark Tale and Shrek 2).

The work was filmed in 3-D; appropriate for this cheeky tongue-in-cheek homage to B- movie worlds from Hollywood (The Blob and Attack of the 50-Foot Woman’ Un-jaded rugrats and baby boomers alike will find plenty to giggle and chuckle at in this story of a young woman losing a man and gaining a monster, or two or three. She is literally transformed from a potential “little woman” newly married to a weather forecaster gunning for evening news anchor in a larger market to—“holy cheezits!”—a towering freak with super-sized strength and freaked-out confusion as to what just happened to her on her wedding day.

Courtesy of a meteorite that lands in the back yard of a Modesto, Calif., church just before she is to exchange vows with Derek Dietl (voice of Paul Rudd). Susan Murphy (voice of Reese Witherspoon) literally raises the roof of the chapel as she suddenly glows and grows up and out of her wedding dress and her fiance’s life.

Courtesy of the U.S. government, Susan is swarmed by mobs of military, who hog tie and hustle her off to a top-secret location, where she makes the acquaintance of three other classified monsters: Cockroach (voice of Hugh Laurie), the Missing Link (voice of Will Arnett) and B.O.B (voice of Seth Rogen).

Once she controls her impulse to scream or faint or run like mad, Susan begins to get a grip on her situation and the possibility that she may never be a size 4, again.

While the government made sure for years that the monsters remained myths to the public, it doesn’t take long, after a gigantic, laser-blazing robot probe arrives on the outskirts of San Francisco, that the feds eagerly spring the monsters from detention and send them out to save the day.

Her pals provide mostly moral support as Susan does all the heavy lifting; going mano-a-mano with the probe at the Golden Gate Bridge. Although the bridge is destroyed, along with a good bit of prime city real estate, Susan and the monsters prevail, drawing the attention of the probe’s owner—the alien Gallaxhar (voice of Rainn Wilson). He is anxious to retrieve the intergalactic element, Quantonium, that transformed Susan so he can launch an invasion of that “miserable mud ball,” Earth.

Even after she’s shrunk back to her former dimensions, Susan’s courage and resourcefulness continue to grow to gigantic proportions, as she goes toes to tentacles with Gallaxhar. While the monsters are cute and Susan is plucky, the real show-stopper is Stephen Colbert as the deliciously doltish leader of the soon-to-be formerly free world.

Rated PG for sci-fi action, crude humor and mild language.

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