Our request to Hollywood: can we have fewer talking CG animals now please?

Looking over the summer blockbuster movie schedule this year, which we've rounded up here, the usual themes started to come through. There are major franchises. There are big comic book movies. Heck, there are one or two quite daring films on the roster, too.

And yet, alarmingly, there's no less than three live action talking CG animal pictures.

Just to make our position clear here: talking animal movies - and we're not talking the Disney animated kind - aren't necessarily a bad thing. Yet, the problem is that for every Babe or something of that ilk, there are a dozen Scooby Doos, where a CGI creature is interspersed with human actors for ‘comic effect'. Thus, you get actors facing off against blue ping-pong balls on sticks, fresh in the knowledge that the mutant that's going to dominate the poster will be added in post-production.

Granted, when this works, it can be quite brilliant. Look at how exquisitely a skilled filmmaker such as Robert Zemeckis knitted everything together in Who Framed Roger Rabbit. That was clever, playing knowingly on the mix of live action and animation, and the end result is still talked about over 20 years later.

Do you think we'll still be saying the same of Alvin & The Chipmunks 2?

I'm guessing not, although that, in itself, isn't a problem. Films have to cater for a broad selection of audiences, and it's right that there's a solid mix out there. And we'll say it: we thought the first half of last year's G-Force, complete with lots of lines from 80s movies in its script, was good fun.

But our alarm bells started ringing once we looked back on that aforementioned blockbuster list. And three films set them off: Furry Vengeance, Cats & Dogs 2 and Marmaduke.

Regretfully, and we'd love to be proved wrong, we don't have high hopes for any of them. We're still haunted, for instance, by the first Cats & Dogs film that someone managed to piss away the idea of two species smacking seven shades out of each other by shoehorning in a terminally dull plot (which is, ultimately, where the aforementioned G-Force faltered). The fact that the sequel has them joining forces and, seemingly, not fighting each other, makes things even worse (have they been watching the original Tom & Jerry movie, that somehow made the same mistake?).

As for Furry Vengeance, it's got surely the scariest poster of any this year. Just look at the bloody thing.

The flurry of such films - and there are more on the way - is surely down to the ridiculous amount of money that the Alvin & The Chipmunks movies have made for Fox. The first pulled in $217m in the US alone, and the second noted up $218m. Not for nothing has Alvin & The Chipmunks 3D already got a release date (16th December 2011). And not for nothing is a take of $219m for that one out of the question.

So here's our request. Rather than Hollywood studios just leaping aboard the latest bandwagon blindly, if they are going to make more films of this ilk, can they please get their writers to go and watch Roger Rabbit again? Or, less charitably, for the first time? At the very  least read the first half of the G-Force script? Because there needs to be more than some knock-offs from Gollum technology here, and getting a Hollywood star to voice a dog in a knowing and wry way alone does not a good film make.

In principle, there's nothing wrong with mixing live action and CG animals. But there is something problematic when it becomes production line fodder, as we're seeing now.

Our simple wish is this: if you are going down this road, can you at least put a decent film at the heart of it, rather than just shovelling in cute-ish animals in the hope that it'll sell to a family audience? Can we have something more than humans are stupid, animals are clever? Where the animals don't help the humans on some path to dimness redemption?

Who knows. All three of this summer's talking computer animals flicks may well turn out to be masterpieces, leaving us to eat our CGI hat.

But right now, the choice between sitting through all three of them or watching the Sex And The City sequel once just isn't as easy as it should be...