Animated Bio of King Jr. Lacks Punch of Reality

“My Friend, Martin,” a one-hour direct-to-video movie from CBS/Fox, is a well-intentioned but ultimately unsatisfying attempt to present an animated biography of Martin Luther King Jr. The filmmakers use archival photographs, historic footage and recordings of King’s voice and have assembled an impressive vocal cast that includes Ed Asner, Danny Glover, Whoopi Goldberg, James Earl Jones, Susan Sarandon and Oprah Winfrey. Yet “My Friend, Martin” stubbornly remains less than the sum of its parts.

The animated Miles (voice by Robert Ri’Chard), an African American sixth-grader from an upscale home, is failing at Martin Luther King Jr. Middle School because he spends too much time on baseball and too little on academics. When his class takes a field trip to King’s home in Atlanta, Miles and his best friend Randy (Lucas Black), a blond, Southern version of a Valley dude, travel through time with the aid of a magic watch. They visit King at various points in his life, including the Montgomery bus boycott in 1956. They’re joined by Maria (Jessica Garcia), a brainy, obnoxious Latino girl, and Kyle (Zachary Leigh), the class bully, for the 1963 march on Washington and King’s legendary “I Have a Dream” speech.

In an attempt to prevent King’s assassination, Miles and Randy bring the teenage Martin (Jaleel White) to present-day Atlanta. But, in a twist on Frank Capra’s “It’s a Wonderful Life,” they find themselves in an Atlanta still divided by segregation. In the end, Martin returns to his own time to fulfill his destiny, and Miles gets an A on his report on King.

For all its good intentions, the screenplay by Dawn Comer, Chris Simmons, Sib Ventress and Deborah Pratt fails to put King and his work into context.

There’s no explanation of when or why Jim Crow laws were passed in the South, nor is there a mention of the legal battle to end school segregation already in progress when King entered public life. The audience sees men in Ku Klux Klan robes, but there’s no explanation of who they are or what they represent.

Ultimately, combining the Saturday morning-style animation with the live-action footage backfires, because the drawn characters are so much less compelling than the real people. But the film’s greatest weakness is its failure to tackle racial problems in contemporary life. The sixth-graders learn that blacks were subjected to discrimination 40 years ago, but they confront bigotry only in the past or in fantasy situations, not in their everyday world.

Race is never a factor in the way the characters react to each other. The animosity between Miles and Kyle isn’t racially motivated, so the grudging friendship they develop doesn’t resonate as an example of King’s philosophy in action.

The final scenes of the sixth-grade class cleaning up a slum and painting a mural honoring King offer appealing images, but they don’t represent individual acts of goodwill and courage overcoming intolerance. The viewer needs to see Miles, Randy, Kyle and Maria learning to look beyond the color of people’s skin, to judge them by the content of their character.

* “My Friend, Martin” is available in video stores.