Educational Media Reviews Online

This film, one part of the seriesThe Adventures of Compass and Alarm Clock, explains science facts through animation. The two characters, Compass taking the teaching role and Alarm Clock acting like a curious child, interact and talk about some properties of water. Through graphics that explain and offer experiments to try, they help viewers understand how water fills space, what capillary action is, what a tsunami is, and how soap bubbles perform.

While the film is colorful in cartoon style with a few realistic objects, there are some strange white dots floating in all the scenes, which are never explained, do not make sense in the context, and are highly distracting. In addition, Compass and Alarm Clock do not look especially like their names, but like robots (there is even a scene in the introduction in a robot factory), and Alarm Clock has some penguin-like qualities.

The sound quality is fine. Background music throughout is very calming, if nondescript. The voices of Compass and Alarm Clock are suitable to their personalities.

The fact that it is a foreign film, from the Ukraine, is not a negative. American children should be exposed to a wide variety of media including international. They should know about grams, centimeters, and other metric measurements, even if they do not use them every day. The pronunciation of capillary, however, with the accent on the second syllable, could be off-putting to American ears.

The dialogue includes a curious reference to Gene Kelly, which children will not get. The combination of subjects in the film also seems odd: tsunamis and soap bubbles?

While this film gets points for effort, and science is a subject in which children should be encouraged to take an interest, it just did not come up to quality standards for this reviewer.

Not Recommended