Cait McAllister

As a kids movie, its actually not that bad. Kids would probably like it. As someone who grew up with the animated series and had the books as a child and watched as an adult, three stars is being considerably generous. The acting isn't bad, but there are a lot of unnecessary plot elements that (I presume) are meant to fill the 1 hour and 30 minutes of run time they somehow thought they could squeeze out of a 5 minute children's book series. The animation leaves a lot to be desired with the CGI dog being disproportionate when small compared to surrounding objects and awkward in how it moves and its facial expressions. The character of the uncle doesn't need to exist but offers very crude humor and basically just makes poor Emily's life way worse than it already is. One of the things that saddened me is that the mission of the story is to return clifford to normal and make Emily feel less alone, but that deviates considerably from the original. In the original story clifford grew gradually from Emily's love for him. Additionally the story didn't really need an antagonist found in a garbage genetics company. It could've worked better as just a sweet relationship between a dog and a child where the two grow together and navigate his size and come to appreciate themselves for who they are. In general, I still prefer the original animated series, I feel they failed to adequately capture what generates the nostalgia felt by older viewers; however, I can see that a kid would probably enjoy it.