The Bad Guys is a charming children’s adventure with a dash of Tarantino

The new DreamWorks animation could be the first children’s film that owes notable creative debts to the work of Quentin Tarantino and a certain heist trilogy starring George Clooney and Brad Pitt. Think of it either as Reservoir Sprogs or Ocean’s Eleven and Unders, swaggering into cinemas in slow-motion just in time for the school break.

Naturally, it begins in a diner, with two suspicious characters are engaged in rambling chit-chat. They are Wolf (voiced by Sam Rockwell) and Snake (Marc Maron) – the ringleader and safecracker of a criminal gang whose members are all typically villainous animals from fairy tales and fables. Awkwafina voices a tech-whizz tarantula, whose eight limbs are idea for rapid laptop work, while Craig Robinson and Anthony Ramos are allegedly a shark and a piranha, though both appear to have arms and legs.

During what should be a career-topping heist the gang are somehow rumbled, and must make amends by taking part in a rehabilitation scheme run by a philanthropically active guinea pig (Richard Ayoade) – whose name is not, in fact, Guinea Pig, but Professor Marmalade. As they reckon with their better natures, the five discover the deep satisfaction of being upstanding citizens, while Professor Marmalade’s own moral compass proves to be less righteous than first impressions suggest.

It all makes for a snappy, charming, slightly disposable adventure, which resorts to easy single-generation laughs (Clooney jokes for the parents, green clouds of flatulence for kids) a little more often than the best films of its type. But the shortfall in writerly finesse is made up for by a hugely appealing animation style that borrows from both the medium’s digital and hand-drawn traditions – call it post-Mitchells Versus the Machines, after Netflix’s pioneering Oscar nominee, which provides the current gold standard of this still very novel artistic approach. (It was also dabbled with recently by Pixar in Turning Red, again with great success.)

This gives The Bad Guys’ terrific opening and closing chase sequences real dazzle and crunch – isn’t it odd that live-action sequences are rarely so imaginative, or thrillingly fluid? – while bringing a classic Hanna-Barbera-like comic immediacy to the characters’ arsenals of gestures and expressions. Snake slithers convincingly through three-dimensional computer-generated space, but he also moves with the same wonderfully tactile, bicycle-chain-like slip and clunk as Kaa in Disney’s The Jungle Book. A few sections sag, and the pacing can feel a little front-loaded, but as easy Easter holiday fun, it meets the brief.

U cert, 100 min. In cinemas now