The Wild Thornberrys Movie's heart is clearly in the right place: By courageously taking a positivist stand on such controversial issues as love, family, personal responsibility, cute animals, and a poacher-free environment, the film makes itself hard to hate. But it's hard to love, too. By now, television series like Rugrats and Aaahh!!! Real Monsters may have inured viewers to the relentlessly ugly animation of production company Klasky-Csupo, but the Thornberry family's grotesquely huge heads, jutting teeth, stick limbs, and mismatched bodies look even more improbable and unpleasant on the big screen than they do on their TV show. The film balances its visual ugliness with a simple but moderately stirring story: As usual, the Thornberrys are traveling the wilds in a camper, shooting a nature show. While her parents (doting but clueless father Tim Curry and bland mother Jodi Carlisle) document the wildlife of the African veldt, designated audience-member wish-fulfillment proxy Lacey Chabert and her plummy-voiced chimp buddy Tom Kane sneak off to ride friendly elephants and romp with cheetah cubs, against the better judgment of the cubs' mother (Alfre Woodard). Chabert, who secretly has the power to speak with animals, recklessly promises that the cubs will be safe in her care, so when one of them is snatched by a poacher, Chabert is guilt-stricken and determined to rescue the young animal. On the advice of Curry's snobbish mother (Lynn Redgrave), Chabert's parents reluctantly protect her from her own valor by sending her to a London boarding school. After a London sequence that mostly seems designed to stretch the film to an acceptable 85 minutes and provide a wistful showcase for a Paul Simon song, Chabert sneaks back to Africa to continue her quest. The Wild Thornberrys Movie has many stock ingredients of a good kids' film—continent-hopping adventure, exotic settings, cuddly critters, secret magic, child heroism—plus many stock ingredients of a marketing success, from the TV tie-in to the recognizable voice stars (including Rupert Everett and Marisa Tomei as the sleazy poachers, and Red Hot Chili Peppers' Flea as a Thornberry adoptee raised by orangutans) to the soundtrack's nods to the likes of Peter Gabriel, Baha Men, and P. Diddy. But even a good heart won't give a film emotional depth or a sense of soul. The Wild Thornberrys Movie goes through the motions, putting its kid stars and their animal pals in peril and plucking them out again, denying and then granting them success. But it never reaches below the obvious surface. Like its disjointed protagonists, the film is composed of a lot of individually acceptable parts that don't quite add up to something human.