Not to be alarmist or anything, but The Powerpuff Girls scared us silly.

This feature-film version of the kids' TV show is so visually hyper that it plays more like an assault than a movie. We hasten to add that kids don't seem to notice.

Much.

The Powerpuff Girls are three little critters who fight crime in a decrepit place called the City of Townsville. They were created in a lab; on TV, the little mutant girls with the great big eyes go about fighting crime and waxing adorable.

That's about what they're up to in The Powerpuff Girls movie, too, only the pace and the visuals are so hyped up that a curious sense of menace informs everything.

The Powerpuff Girls attempts to explain the origins of our heroines and their nemesis, Mojo JoJo (voiced by Roger L. Jackson), a lab monkey who has become an evil genius. The little girls are the creation of Professor Utonium (voiced by Tom Kane), who tried to create the perfect girls from sugar, spice, everything nice, etc. -- and wound up with a trio of superpowered tots.

The film reveals the girls' initial struggle to understand their own ability to fly, shoot lasers out of their eyes, lift massive weights, leap tall buildings in a single bound and so forth, but the learning curve involves smashing the heck out of the City of Townsville. After much destruction, the girls are tricked by Mojo Jojo into unleashing even more bad stuff.

This bad stuff involves mutating simians of all descriptions running amok in the City of Townsville. The rampaging monkeys/chimps/gorillas/etc. are scary. Creepy, too.

Much of the disquiet factor in The Powerpuff Girls comes from the animation style, which is spare, weird and futuristic and -- to this viewer -- profoundly off-putting. Ugly, even.

The action escalates from the girls' superpowered capacity to make peanut butter and jelly sandwiches (cute!) to scenes of mass destruction (enough, already!) and never stops. As well, the Powerpuff Girls' whining need to be loved by the people of the City of Townsville seems mighty suspect.

Few movies for children are good enough to amuse the adults who must accompany them. The Powerpuff Girls is not one of the few.

(This film is rated PG)

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