A version of this review appeared in The Age, October 27, 2011.
Not every little girl wants to grow up to be a princess, and it's a pleasant change when a Hollywood family film gives us a heroine like Judy Moody (Jordana Beatty) – bossy, a bit insecure, but too eager for excitement to worry about being uncool.
There isn't much plot to this adaptation of a series of novels by Megan McDonald, directed in colourful, cartoonish style by John Schultz: very simply, it's the chronicle of how Judy manages to entertain herself over the school holidays while her parents are away. A born organiser, she decides to turn the summer into a competition – a kind of scavenger hunt where she and her timid second-best-friend (Preston Bailey) dash around their small Michigan town trying to score “thrill points”. The main adult on the scene is Judy's groovy Aunt Opal (Heather Graham), a world traveller and “guerrilla artist” with her own ideas about how to have fun.
There's a cheeky edge to the film, with its emphasis on scatological humour – Judy and company go on something called a “poop picnic” – and its relaxed view of risky, unsupervised activities such as tightrope walking over a creek. Yet compared to similar productions such as the Diary of a Wimpy Kid series, Judy Moody shows a touching lack of cynicism: when a beloved teacher (Jaleel White) busts out his banjo and starts singing his own words to “Oh Susannah,” the kids in his class are filled with delight.
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