It is one of those great puzzling facts of the cinema that even though animation allows filmmakers to unfurl their creative visions & create entire universes as vast, wide và detailed as their imaginations, the number of genuinely good animated science-fiction films is surprisingly low. Oh sure, there are a few gems here & there, including the family favorites “WALL-E” & “The Iron Giant” và more adult-oriented efforts lượt thích “Fantastic Planet,” “Heavy Metal,” “A Scanner Darkly,” & the anime classics “Akira” & “Ghost in the Shell.” But, for the most part, there is something about the infinite possibilities that the combination of genre & format has to offer that seems khổng lồ stymie filmmakers & leads them to instead offer up such banal retreads as “Battle for Terra,” “Escape from Planet Earth,” “Mars Needs Moms,” “Planet 51,” “Pinocchio in Outer Space,” to name just a few. Even the fabled “Star Wars” franchise was unable khổng lồ avoid this tendency when it went the animated route with “Star Wars: The Clone Wars,” which currently stands as the cinematic low point of the saga to date.

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The latest film lớn epitomize this odd trend is “Spark: A Space Tail,” an utterly lifeless và profoundly unoriginal animated effort that is desperately lacking the very thing in its title. This is the kind of film that borrows, lớn put it politely, so many things from other sources that older viewers could amuse themselves—since the film sure isn’t going to—by trying lớn see how many lifts from other, better genre favorites they can find. In the first 90 seconds or so alone, we are introduced to lớn Bana, a world populated almost entirely by monkeys that is then attacked by the hateful General Zhong (A.C. Peterson), who deploys a fearsome space creature known as a Galactic Kraken that creates a đen hole that tears the planet apart into tiny shards, one of which contains Spark, the infant son of Bana’s benevolent leader, who, perhaps inevitably, also happens lớn be Zhong’s brother.

Thirteen years pass & Spark (Jace Norman) is now an increasingly restless teenager whose only companions are friends Chunk (Rob deLeeuw) & Vix (Jessica Biel), who go off from time to lớn time khổng lồ salvage junk, & a robot caretaker known as Bananny. Desperate for excitement, Spark intercepts a message summoning his friends & decides khổng lồ “borrow” their spaceship & respond to it himself. Through circumstances too labored to lớn get into here, Spark finds himself in possession of a device belonging lớn Zhong that will allow him to lớn track the wily & elusive Kraken và use the threat of its destructive power to make the rest of the universe bow to lớn him. Instead of taking the device back to his friends, Spark decides lớn go hunting for the Kraken himself. Without giving too much away, this leads khổng lồ a series of misadventures that eventually result in him leading a ragtag group of outcasts into a final battle against Zhong’s massive forces as he at long last discovers both his birthright và his ultimate purpose.

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If you think that description was unbelievably tedious and lacking in anything remotely resembling originality, imagine sitting there & watching it all play out over the course of its seemingly endless 90-minute running time. Writer/director Aaron Woodley has come up with a story that brings so little of anything new khổng lồ the proceedings that even the very young children—its target audience—will be sensing that they have seen it all before and almost certainly done better there than here. (The closest thing by Woodley that"s close khổng lồ narrative innovation is the weird preponderance of jokes revolving around digestive issues on display.) Visually, the film is also a bust as the look offers nothing of value either—even though it could create virtually anything thanks to the animated format, the worlds và the creatures inhabiting them are as generic as can be. As for the characters, they fail lớn inspire much enthusiasm either: Spark is pretty much a jerk in the early scenes và a bore in the later ones, Zhong is a drag whose big character detail is that he is self-conscious about being short (you know, just lượt thích the bad guy in “Shrek”) and the others are so colorless that they tend to fade from memory even while they are still up there on the screen.

The truly baffling thing about “Spark: A Space Tail” is that even though it seems as if it was always destined lớn be dribbled out in a few theaters during an otherwise busy weekend before landing on home clip as soon as the contracts allow, it nevertheless somehow managed to get a number of familiar faces, including a couple of Oscar winners, to contribute their vocal talents. Jessica Biel supplies the voice of the spunky & resourceful Vix và Patrick Stewart portrays the leader of a group of stranded soldiers whom Spark recruits lớn help him defeat Zhong. More bizarrely, the voice of the Queen of Bana, who yearns to lớn one day reunite with her son, is done by Hillary Swank, a move that is all the stranger since it is a supporting part at best. Finally, no less of a star than Susan Sarandon herself gets the honor of providing the voice of Bananny, a robot that is basically a combination of WALL-E and the Granny from the Tweety & Sylvester cartoons. Granted, choosing to lớn supply the voice of a milk-and-cookie dispensing robot in a cartoon that virtually no one is going khổng lồ see is far from the most questionable choice that Sarandon has made recently. Of course, her work here will not play a part in any future Lifetime Achievement tributes unless the person putting the đoạn phim reel together is a former Hillary Clinton supporter.

Peter Sobczynski is a contributor to eFilmcritic.com và Magill"s Cinema Annual và can be heard weekly on the nationally syndicated "Mancow"s Morning Madhouse" radio show.