Tim Minchin and Eric Bana go back to the outback in a sweet comedy

BACK TO ABROAD ★★★ ½

(G) 94 minutes, cinemas and Netflix from December 10th

In Netflix’s new animated feature Back to OutbackTim Minchin gives voice to a koala called Pretty Boy, who leads a spoiled life in Sydney’s zoo, after settling down well in his role as the poster child of Australian wildlife.

Isla Fisher as Maddie the taipan, Angus Imrie as Nigel the scorpion, Guy Pearce as Frank the hairy funnel-web spider, and Tim Minchin as Pretty Boy the koala.

However, he is not the star of the film. That honor goes to Maddie, a taipan who does not kindly accept the way children and their parents crawl together from her cleaved tongue and fangs. Like her fellow prisoners at the zoo, Scorpio Nigel, Frank the funnel, and Zoe the thorny devil lizard, she desperately wants to be loved.

Crocodile Jackie (Jacki Weaver), the group’s self-appointed cave mother, takes a more philosophical approach to their unpopularity. “Have fun with it,” she tells them, occasionally enjoying the opportunity to send a frisson through her audience.

Loading

It is a view shared by the film’s American producers and co-directors, Australian screenwriter Harry Cripps and Irishman Clare Knight, who has worked as an editor in the British film industry. They are out to take advantage of the fact that children often head for the most fearsome and least cozy animals in the zoo.

It’s a simple idea, and Cripps and Knight have recruited a star-studded cast. Keith Urban gives voice to a singing toad that serenades his partner (Gia Carides) with a velvety rendition of When a man loves a woman, and Eric Bana speaks for Chaz, an animal caretaker whose reputation rests on his success in capturing 10 Komoda dragons with a few budgie smugglers and some Vegemite.

Chaz and his boy Chazzie (Angus Imrie) are keen to pick up Maddie (Isla Fisher) and friends after fleeing the zoo and starting to take on the outback, whom they only know from Jackie’s bedtime stories. Their sense of direction is blurred to say the least, but with some help from an undercover agency dedicated to helping the sensitive and misunderstood and known as the Ugly Secret Society, they win.