I have no good reason for having seen this movie, other than it was hot outside, I had two hours to kill, and had seen everything else on at the movie theater except for My Soul to Take -- and the likelihood of my voluntarily watching that film or any of its terrifying ilk in a darkened cinema and alone is somewhat less than my signing up to be a black market organ donor.

This movie, in case you’re unaware, is the tale of Sammy, a greenback turtle who goes on, well, adventures, and finds a “secret passage” between two oceans. It’s pretty aptly named, you see. Along the way, he makes friends with a smooth-talking leatherhead turtle named Ray, an aggressively French cat named Fluffy and a human named Snow, while also romancing his childhood sweetheart, Shelly.

One thing I like about this movie is the sense of history it imparts. After the first flurry of excitement attending to Sammy’s birth (he nearly dies about seven times before he even hits the water for the first time) and his meetings with Shelly and Ray are dispensed with, there is a period of ten years, glossed over quickly, in which nothing much happens except that he sails around the sea and gets bigger. Turtles, we must remember, are very long-lived and far-ranging creatures, and we get a feeling for that, not only in the way that they are in no hurry to get anywhere in particular for a good long time, but also in the way we see human events play out in front of their eyes. We know from the outset that Sammy makes it to fifty years of age (this is one of those movies that begins at the ending, which I usually hate, but here I think it could make the perils to come a little less upsetting for its target audience), and so when he takes us back to the beginning of that life and we see the changes wrought in his home sands of Baja, California, it gives the ensuing tale an unusually historical perspective.

Now, there can be no denying that the baby turtles in this movie are super cute, as most baby things are, and anyone who enjoyed the adorability of Squirt in Finding Nemo is sure to find little Sammy and his family delight. And this would not be a kids’ movie about animals in the wild without putting forth a plethora of heavy-handed environmental messages -- everything from oil spills to littering to global warming to whaling -- although these messages do seem more than a little mixed, what with the capture and graffitiing of Sammy by well-meaning hippy Snow (played by a still childlike-sounding Melanie Griffith) and her attempts to mate him with another incarcerated greenback, Vera (played by a very bored-sounding Kathy Griffin).

Ah, yes. The mating. The main problem of any of these kids’ movies that anthropomorphize animals is that a big part of any species’ life cycle revolves around mating. Some movies, like The Lion King and Happy Feet, manage to have the whole unsavory thing veiled in romance and snappy production numbers; Sammy’s Adventures does not do that, and its pointed discussion of reproduction and certain natural urges could well lead to uncomfortable questions from any among the more percipient of youngsters. Much of it I’m going to put down to the fact that that this movie was written and produced by Europeans, even though it was voice cast and set in the English-speaking world. (This movie’s soundtrack, by the way: pop music. Mostly very out of place pop music. Odd.) Also, the cold biological fact that we must face here is that love interest Shelly is most probably Sammy’s sister. So, that’s nice.

The animation in this film is truly flummoxing: on the one hand, it offers up breathtaking seascapes that put one in mind of the IMAX underwater documentaries, but on the other, we have badly articulated people and some very cartoonish lead characters. But the 3D is truly exceptional, and definitely worth the viewing.

Not much else in this movie is, however -- at least, not for adults. This is an old school, moral-of-the-story kids movie, like The Land Before Time or FernGully: The Last Rainforest, as opposed to the Pixar and Dreamworks-style flicks we’ve come to expect, in which there is a whole other level of story inserted for us grownups that flies right over the little ones’ heads. (Unless that whole mating thing was supposed to be for us? But if that’s the case… ew.)

The secret passage of the title, by the way? The Panama Canal. I only know this because there’s this whole scene with a school of piranha circling Sammy and Shelly just before they find the passage, and I know that piranha inhabit South American rivers, while also being vaguely aware that the Panama Canal is down there somewhere, too. I think. Not a kid in the world would get that, though… in fact, the whole secret passage thing is given pretty short shrift considering it’s in the title.

Hey, maybe that’s in there for the adults, too! Great. Blatant references to amphibian sex and a geography lesson. Thanks, Sammy’s Adventures. Maybe I would have been better off seeing My Soul to Take, after all. (No, not really.)

  -- Rachel Hyland