Doctor Who: Dreamland

"That doesn't look good," The Doctor says at one point during Dreamland, the latest Doctor Who animation from the BBC, and sadly that's the overriding impression most people will take away from this 3D CGI animation.

While the scenery, vehicles, space craft etc all look perfectly adequate, the animation of the human figures is strangely jerky and stilted, like a scene from an old video game, and it is so odd that it often distracts from the story.

Phil Ford's pacy script sees the 10th Doctor (voiced by David Tennant) turning up in '50s America, a decade after the Roswell UFO crash, in New Mexico and getting drawn into his usual "stop the alien invasion" plot.

There's a variety of aliens to choose from as well - from the cute greys (traditionally associated with the Roswell Incident), the android Alliance of Shades' Men In Black (whose job is to keep Earth ignorant of extraterrestrial life... and just have to return in a future, live action Doctor Who 'historical' story), the giant insectoid Viperox (with their leader Lord Azlok, voiced by the great David Warner) and a hive brain of Skorpius Flies thrown in for good measure.

There's a half-hearted attempt to confuse the audience into thinking the Viperox might not be invading Earth and that the greys might be the threat, but this is a red herring that goes nowhere and is soon forgotten about.

To be honest the aliens were the best part of Dreamland, all of them being intriguing enough to warrant an appearance in the core TV show (or one of its live-action spin-offs); turns out I was totally wrong about the Veil (from Prisoner Of The Judoon) being in the story though, as the alien convict in The Sarah Jane Adventures simply downloaded the schematics of the greys' crashed ship in that story and had no other connection with Dreamland.

Toss in some Cold War politics and pig-headed American military figures to confuse matters, and you've got a decent action thriller on your hands, set in a fascinating milieu previously untouched in the show's long televisual life.

I realise that the BBC was aiming for something quite different in style to their previous, more traditional 2D animated feature, The Infinite Quest, but given that this took a year to animate I'd have expected something a bit more dynamic than the final stiff style of Dreamland.