Cooked

It's described as an "unlikely love triangle", but that's before we meet a lobster on a snowmobile. He's Dan, voiced by David Morrisey, and he's a bit of a show-off. The object of his affecting is Lucy (Katherine Parkinson - Jen from The IT Crowd), a rather charming seal but, and let's be honest here, not his type. Watching from afar, and eager to impress is Rob, a walrus, voiced by Stephen Mangan.

Not straying too far from type, Rob is a little odd, a little rubbish, and not quite right. For sure you'd think one of the stars of Beyond The Pole would question the romantic rivalry between a crustacean and one kind of mammal for a mammal of a second sort, but it's more odd as to why that juxtaposition grates more than them all visiting the same arctic gymnasium and managing to find adjoining treadmills. That's before the sauna gets involved, of course, and events take a darker (yet also pinker) turn.

Alpha-male displays are one thing, but even once the species lines are blurred by prowess, one would think some questions would be asked when a tusk falls out. That's before we get to the unfortunately not-comic appearance of a baleen whale.

The characters are animated in a flat 2-D that looks at times like someone is trying to make South Park with crepe paper rather than construction, on (admittedly competent) 3-D CGI backgrounds, which produces a slight disconnect. The character design seems off somehow, as if they've managed to find three separate uncanny valleys to pull new species out of. Throw in relatively recognisable voices - Mangan's tones in particular are distinctive - and disbelief does not remain long suspended. Paul Lambert's music isn't too bad, but there's a self-conscious "wacky" edge to it, indeed, to most of the film - this is near enough the animated equivalent of a mug that says "You don't have to be crazy to work here..."

While Jens Blank's direction is straightforward enough, it doesn't overcome the fact that this isn't the most aesthetically pleasing animation. It does seem odd to complain that Caroline Bruckner's script doesn't make a lot of sense, but it's the lack of internal consistency that does for it. If Cooked had a goose it has probably flown off, and save for Brit-com completists audiences might as well do so too.