Free Birds

A turkey (voice by Owen Wilson) despairs of ever rousing his fellows to resist the annual Thanksgiving slaughter. Then, he meets one (Woody Harrelson) who has, er, hatched a wild scheme to hijack a secret government time machine, go back to 1621, and get turkey off the menu at the first Thanksgiving. The current economics of animation often means that what once might have made a good seven-minute cartoon gets blown up to feature length—but this one wouldn't even be worth seven minutes. Director Jimmy Hayward and his battalion of animators don't even seem clear on what a turkey looks like—here some look like pigeons, others like eagles, still others like God only knows what. The script by Hayward and Scott Mosier (story by David I. Stern and John J. Strauss) is weighed down by jokes of dreary lameness.