Napoleon Dynamite

The TV series picks up perfectly where the movie left off, adding spice along the way.

Whether Napoleon will work as a weekly animated series may depend on how well a teenager fits in with the other oddballs who populate Fox's Sunday-night animation bloc.

The combination of the characters and the style made the whole shebang much easier for me to take than the movie. Still, I didn't feel any need to watch later episodes.

Over all, though, Sunday night's episodes are neither here nor there, lacking the oddball singularity of the movie while not yet achieving the satirical bite that would make the TV show interesting.

While animation liberates Napoleon and his world from the usual physical restrictions, it somehow lessens the overall appeal of the character and setting.

Animating [the movie] doesn't actually make it better (or even funny), even if you bring back the original cast to do the voice work.

The characters are readymade jokes unto themselves, and the plots unfolding around them seem like little more than scenes found on the film's cutting room floor.