It's every rebellious kid's dream - that aliens would swoop down, kidnap their parents and leave them to gorge on burgers, spend all night at the funfair and have no-one to answer to.

Then it happens to the youngsters of Retroville when pint-sized brainbox Jimmy Neutron draws the extra-terrestrials down after planting a satellite (based on a toaster) in space.

The initial rush of celebrating the absence of parental control soon wears thin and the kiddies - swollen with food and missing their mums - are a little bit lost.

After all, there's no-one to look after them as the egg-shaped Yokians have made off with their parents and whisked them back to their planet, to a grim fate.

Jimmy thinks his know-how will get them out of this scrape and steps into the breach - much to the undisguised distrust of his high school nemesis Cindy Vortex (voiced by Carolyn Lawrence).

In just a matter of hours he's transformed the new Retroland Amusement Park into a task force, including a flying ferris wheel, a space-travelling merry-go-round and customised fairground rocket ships.

Crewing this motley collection of spacecraft are his trusty robotic dog Goddard, Jimmy's best pal, the asthmatic Carl Wheezer and Sheen, who's convinced he's the action hero Ultralord.

Can Jimmy pull it off, charm the frosty Cindy and save everybody's mum and dad or will the dastardly Yokians win the day?

We're all getting pretty used to state-of-the-art special effects and now the movie-makers have to turn their attentions to plot and script if they are going to impress.

This does impress, up to a point - but it won't draw in the adult audiences who were so cleverly wooed, in Shrek and Toy Story, by dialogue that worked on two levels.

John A Davis has recreated the pastel-coloured world of 1950s Americana with Jimmy's inventions technically years ahead of their time while styled in a design almost half a century old. In other words, it looks great.

Its target audience is kids - and no kid who takes a ride with James Isaac Neutron (geddit?) is going to be disappointed.

Tim Evans