Only once or twice a year does a family film such as The Iron Giant come along to nourish a child's imagination. The remaining movies are bad babysitters, cynical projects that either encourage kids to be overstimulated brats, like the live-action Inspector Gadget, or offer an uninspired, blandly wholesome dose of Ritalin, like the animated Inspector Gadget. Based on Ouida's 1872 children's classic, A Dog Of Flanders fits so snugly into the latter category that it's little wonder the book is on its fourth screen adaptation. Many sentimental clichés are carted out in an effort to wring tears from impressionable youngsters, including a poor, orphaned moppet looking for his long-lost father, a floppy-eared pooch he rescues from abuse, and his hacking, terminally ill grandfather. At different ages, Jesse James and Jeremy James Kissner play the orphan, an aspiring young artist in a quaint 19th-century Flemish village. Inspired by the work of baroque painter Peter Paul Rubens, he enters a contest to stave off grandfather Jack Warden's evil landlord and impress mysterious mentor Jon Voight. Were it not in the title, his shaggy companion would seem like an afterthought, but the harmless boy-and-his-dog antics are a welcome distraction from A Dog Of Flanders' heavier agenda. Some spark of imagination might have pushed its many shopworn elements across, but director Kevin Brodie—whose questionable credits include a sexy thriller starring barrel-scrapers C. Thomas Howell and Tia Carrere—stages them with the indifference of a hired gun. Though inoffensive and fairly serviceable in its non-ambition, A Dog Of Flanders is a film about art without a single artistic flourish. That is, until its campy, transcendental finale, which will have all but the most devoted Touched By An Angel fans hooting in derision.
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