MOVIE REVIEW : ‘Fievel Goes West’ at Top Speed

“An American Tail: Fievel Goes West,” the sequel to the 1986 hit animated feature that opens today citywide, owes more to old Warner Bros. cartoons and live-action Westerns than it does to its predecessor.

Don Bluth, who directed the highly successful “An American Tail,” has been replaced by Phil Nibbelink and Simon Wells, and the animation is done by a new group of artists. The first-time directors and their crew have created an upbeat, G-rated entertainment that’s so relentlessly fast-paced, the projector seems stuck in fast-forward.

Two years after arriving in New York City from Russia, plucky Fievel Mousekewitz (voice by Phillip Glasser) and the rest of his family--Mama (Erica Yohn), Papa (Nehemiah Persoff), Tanya (Cathy Cavadini) and baby sister--have discovered the streets in America are not “paved with cheese” as they had imagined. Dissatisfied with the poverty and thuggish cats of New York, circa 1887, they decide to go West to seek a new promised land.

Their decision puts them at the mercy of the unscrupulous Cat R. Waul (John Cleese, essentially reprising the incongruous British sheriff he played in “Silverado”), who plans to lure all the urban mice to a remote, desolate town, put them to work building a saloon for him and then eat them. Naturally, Fievel manages to foil this scheme with the help of Tiger (Dom DeLuise), his vegetarian cat friend, and the over-the-hill canine marshal Wylie Burp (James Stewart, in a kind of self-parodying “Destry Hobbles Again”).

The earlier “American Tail” attempted to retell the epic story of the 19th-Century immigrants who came to America seeking religious freedom. The new film isn’t really about anything. Once the Mousekewitz family decides to move West, the story devolves into a series of convenient contrivances: Tanya is supposed to be such an awful singer that the neighbors throw vegetables at her, but Cat R. Waul acclaims her as a diva. Why? So he can use her as the lure in a giant mousetrap.

But the film’s biggest problem is its unrelenting, breakneck pace. Sequences that would otherwise be fun--a Spielberg-esque roller-coaster ride through the sewers of New York; a catchy saloon production number, “The Girl You Left Behind,” and the climactic confrontation that pits Wylie, Tiger and Fievel (as slingshot-slingers) against Cat R. Waul’s gang--fail to please because every other scene is pitched at the same frenetic speed. Viewers don’t get a chance to catch their breath until the mawkish conclusion, when Burp pontificates, “One man’s sunset is another man’s dawn.”

“Fievel Goes West” is obviously aimed at children, but parents may be troubled by some scenes of questionable taste. Burp lives up to his moniker, and there are lots of belching gags with clouds of green gas. An even more dubious sequence involves Tiger’s capture by a tribe of Indian mice (or are they prairie dogs?). Depicting these characters as ‘30s Hollywood-style Indians who wear feather bonnets and do woo-woo war whoops seems a poor choice, and especially at a time when American Indian activists are protesting the film “Black Robe.”

Although the animation is generally fluid, the characters don’t really do much acting: Their expressions and movements don’t communicate nuances of thought and emotion. The most effective work in the film involves tricky point-of-view shots, such as inside a rolling tumbleweed.

The new crew reworked and improved the designs of most of the characters, but the obese, jiggling Tiger still doesn’t look like a cat--or any other animal on this planet. The viewer wonders just what his girlfriend, the more vivid (and believably feline) Miss Kitty (Amy Irving), sees in him.

Although it seems unlikely that “American Tail” will have the adult appeal of Disney’s vastly superior “Beauty and the Beast,” the film will probably please kids who’ve been parked at the mall multiplex while their parents attend to holiday shopping. However, small children may feel left behind as the scenes whiz by like runaway freight cars.

‘An American Tail:

Fievel Goes West’

Phillip Glasser: Fievel

James Stewart: Wylie

John Cleese: Cat R. Waul

Dom DeLuise: Tiger

A Universal release of a Steven Spielberg presentation. Directors Phil Nibbelink, Simon Wells. Producers Steven Spielberg, Robert Watts. Executive producers Frank Marshall, Kathleen Kennedy, David Kirschner. Story Charles Swenson. Screenplay Flint Dille. Created by David Kirschner. Original songs James Horner, Will Jennings. Music Horner. Running time: 1 hour, 15 minutes.

MPAA-rated G.