Mee-Shee – The Water Giant [DVD]

‘Free Willy’ meets the Loch Ness monster in this children’s fantasy story brought to life by Jim Henson’s Animatronics. Nine-year-old Mac (Daniel Magder) is devastated when his father cancels a planned trip to Disneyworld because of work commitments. However, things start to look up when Mac arrives at the remote lake where his father is working and stumbles upon a mythical water creature rumoured to live there. With oil developers moving in to destroy the creature’s habitat, it’s a race against time for Mac to save his new friend.
A crackling good family adventure, Mee-Shee: The Water Giant stars Bruce Greenwood as a New York City oil-company engineer who interrupts a vacation with his young son, Mac (Daniel Magder), to rescue valuable equipment from the bottom of a British Columbia lake. The effort is somewhat complicated by Mee-Shee, a playful and benevolent cousin of the Loch Ness monster but presumed to be fiction by the local community. Mac, however, encounters Mee-Shee (constructed by the late Jim Henson’s Creature Shop) and they become friends, but a pair of industrial saboteurs looking for the biggest score of all have other ideas. The nice cast includes Phyllida Law as the prim landlady of a boarding house (she’s ever-so-reminiscent of daughter Emma Thompson in Nanny McPhee), Rena Owen as the lone adult who has seen Mee-Shee and regularly feeds it salmon, and Luanne Gordon as an environmental cop. Director John Henderson, who visited this territory once before in the Ted Danson vehicle, Loch Ness, makes a very crisp drama—with real villains and passions—out of material that might have been quite mawkish in someone else’s hands. –Tom Keogh