Disney's Mars Needs Moms, out on Blu-Ray and DVD on Aug. 9, follows the journey of Milo (Seth Green, Chris on Family Guy), a boy who's at the age when listening to your parents is not high on the list of priorities. One day Milo wishes he didn’t have a mother, and soon enough he doesn’t. Noises and bright lights lead Milo outside in the middle of the night to find that his mother (a motherly Joan Cusack) is being abducted by aliens.
Milo boards the spacecraft headed to Mars, where he learns that his mother's memory will soon be wiped clean and she will be put to work. Mars needs moms, you see, because its inhabitants aren’t capable of raising children. Instead of flesh-and-blood parents, the Martian children are reared by programmed drones which "learn" their parenting skills from human mothers. It's a clever idea, but one that MNM renders foggy and underdeveloped. Animated films aren't always the best at maintaining coherent plots or ideas, but the lapse here is glaring. This is a Disney product, after all, and the house that Mickey built usually aims higher.
This article appears in Aug 4-10, 2011.