So imagine there’s this man. A man who is determined to have sex with this one woman, no matter what. She’s smokin’ hot and… and no yeah that’s basically all he knows, but hell, that’s all he needs to know. She’s not interested (most women aren’t in stalkers), but he keeps hanging around, trying it on, getting her a bit drunk, convincing her that there’s no other way and eventually – most likely through exhaustion – she gives it up. What a tale. A harrowing message for our sexually pressurised generation. Now, imagine exactly the same story, but with wolves. Awww, look how cute the wolves are! Yay for their lupine antics!

So, Justin Long (shame on you Justin Long) lends his voice to Humphrey, a regular Joe wolf who lusts not-so-casually after Kate (Hayden Panettiere); the sexiest piece of wolf in their pack. The problem? She’s an Alpha, and he’s an Omega, and in the way that Katherine Heigl in every film is out of the league of Seth Rogen in every film, it aint ever gonna happen. Humphrey is desperate for Kate to be his “howling” partner (don’t even get us started), but Kate’s already been betrothed to another – the son of a rival pack leader. Their marriage – that’s right, wolves get married now – will unite the two packs, and mean peace and prosperity for wolves throughout the land. At first Kate is pretty happy with the arrangement, until she and her new fiancé Garth “howl” together (alright, sex, OK? Hairy dirty wolfey sex that they can’t show because it’s for KIDS you SICKO but hell, its still BRILLIANT cos it’s SEX so let’s make sure it’s referred to throughout the ENTIRE FILM.) It turns out Garth can’t howl to save his life, and we, poor mortals, are we forced to visualise what that actually means.

Fortunately for all our mental wellbeings, Kate and Humphrey are accidently shipped to Idaho by humans, with the intent that they will repopulate the surrounding area (SEX SEX SEX SEX SEX). Kate is less than impressed with the idea, and is determined to get home to fulfil her destiny with Garth (but don’t forget how rubbish the SEX will be). Humphrey just wants to get his end away (sex), but it looks like he’s not going to manage it. Or is he? With an entire journey back home to badger her for action, and a duck and a goose who turn up entirely and only to help him, it doesn’t look like poor old Kate gets much of a choice…

Alpha and Omega is a joyless, flat and paceless non-adventure, and any jokes within it are either stolen from better films or, failing that, from Daz adverts. The characters are either deeply unlikable or – in the case of poor Kate – completely underdeveloped, meaning that we genuinely couldn’t care less about what happens to them. The animation too is uniformly dreadful – why Lionsgate picked an animal that they quite simply don’t know how to draw is beyond me – you spend most of your time sub-consciously trying to work out what creature they actually look like. The closest I could get was an owl’s face mixed carefully with the features of a paper maché horse. Qualifying as a kids film only because its got animals wot talk in it, the single enduring moral for the tender generation is that the most persistent sex pest gets the girl. Pixar must be shitting themselves.