High School Musical 3: Senior Year Review

Little kids want to be big kids: the out-of-nowhere global success of the High School Musical series is down to the five-to-nine year olds who aspire to the all-singing, all-dancing teens on the screen. The psychotic funk of adolescence is scrubbed down with wire wool and presented to the pre-pubescent audience as a joyously cool time of togetherness, first love and song.

The factions of the American high school are here - the jocks, the emos, the brainiacs, the preppies - but they all get along. Adolescence is tribal and primal, bursting with sex and violence and paranoia. Not here. As served up for younger brothers or sisters, it is merely cool, a dream of innocence floated by High School Musical 3: Senior Year.

Not all parents like it. Let's not be mealy mouthed about it. Middle class liberal mums and dads instinctively cringe at the sight of their little ones being caught up in this imported cult. It's not just knee-jerk anti-Americanism; the same reservations exist amongst the great and the good of the USA. And it is not that High School Musical prematurely exposes their babies to bad behaviour. A safer, more unthreatening and chaste movie is hard to imagine - it makes March Of The Penguins look like Salo, Or The 120 Days Of Sodom. (Ah, if only Pasolini's filthy obsessive movie had featured penguins instead of Nazis). It's not even that the film comes with landfills of merchandising: we loved WALL-E didn't we? So what's the problem?