In today's market, anything can become a children's fable. Harry Potter, Narnia, and Lord of the Rings have so opened the floodgates of all things fantasy that I half-expect to see a Bigfoot cartoon this time next year. This season we get a children's spin on the Loch Ness Monster, courtesy of Sony's The Water Horse: The Legend of the Deep, a well-intentioned but horribly dull film that parents are more likely to use to help their children fall asleep than to inspire their imaginations. The Water Horse features an awkward combination of real-life drama (war in a kid's movie is always a dangerous idea) and cutesy physical humor that never blends and, despite typically good work by Emily Watson, Ben Chaplin, and Millions' Alex Etel, the project sinks to the bottom of the Christmas movie lake.

Based on the book by Dick King-Smith, The Water Horse is essentially a flashback film. Two young travelers meet a man (Brian Cox) in a pub who offers to tell them true story of Nessie. Against the natural instincts of most people when it comes to drunken Scotsman with stories of monsters, the pair settle in for the story of The Water Horse. A young man named Angus MacMorrow is a lonely boy who missed his father, a man that is off serving his country in WWII. One day, lonely Angus finds an egg, from which hatches a very weird-looking creature that kind of resembles a dragon. Angus keeps the creature hidden from his mother (Emily Watson) and names him Crusoe. Of course, Crusoe grows and displays a fondness for H2O, so Angus places him the mythical Loch Ness. Meanwhile, the army invades Angus' relative safety, setting up camp in his house to be the final line should the Germans invade Scotland. As Crusoe grows, he becomes harder and harder to keep secret and the local townspeople and the men with guns start to get suspicious. The fantasy of mythical lake creatures and the reality of war collide.

The Water Horse has a few moments of cutesy charm, mostly courtesy of the work by Alex Etel, but the whole project has such a drab, gray palate that it never even succeeds where most of the recent fantasy flops have in being eye candy for the little ones. Crusoe starts off looking weird and gets downright scary when he becomes bigger than a jet airliner and starts taking Angus on underwater journeys. Poor creature design aside, it's admirable to try and make a dark children's film and it has worked before, but director Jay Russell can't balance the drama of the wartime setting with the potentially heartwarming fantasy at the film's core. He ends up with a movie that varies wildly in tone and yet is still stunningly dull at times, both in plot and visually, and that leaves a talented group of actors, not to mention a legendary creature, out to dry.