General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20265 min read

Doogal

Doogal is a 2006 American animated children's film, the re-edited and re-dubbed United States version of the 2005 British-French CGI film The Magic Roundabout, itself adapted from Serge Danot's French television series Le Manège Enchanté (1964). Released by The Weinstein Company on February 24, 2006, it was critically panned and became a byword for a poorly handled localization.¹^•²^•³

Key fact	Detail
US release	February 24, 2006, wide, distributed by The Weinstein Company; rated G¹
Directors	Jean Duval, Frank Passingham, and Dave Borthwick¹
US screenwriters	Butch Hartman and Cory Edwards¹
Budget and gross	$20 million budget; domestic gross $7,417,319 and overseas gross $19,273,924³
Critical scores	9% on the Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer (47 reviews); Metascore 23; IMDb 2.8/10 from about 5.7K users¹^•⁴
Voice cast	Daniel Tay (Doogal), Jon Stewart (Zeebad), Whoopi Goldberg (Ermintrude), Jimmy Fallon (Dylan), William H. Macy (Brian), Chevy Chase (Train), Bill Hader (Sam), Judi Dench (narrator)⁵^•⁶
Source	Redub of The Magic Roundabout (2005), from Serge Danot's characters; premiered in France February 2, 2005 and the UK February 11, 2005²^•⁷

Spoilers

Plot

Florence and her animal friends live in the Enchanted Village under the care of Zebedee, a kindly wizard. Zeebad, the evil double of Zebedee, reappears after being encased in ice for eons and threatens to start another ice age; the only way to stop him is for Florence and her friends to find three magic diamonds before he does.¹ In the US version's framing, the careless puppy Doogal crashes a candy cart into Zeebad's frozen chamber, releasing the wicked wizard, who sets out to rule and freeze the world; Zeebad imprisons Florence and other children and recruits the wooden soldier Sam as his sidekick, leaving the rescue to Doogal and his friends.⁵

Doogal's companions are Dylan, a guitar-playing rabbit; Brian, a bashful snail; Ermintrude, an opera-singing, disco-dancing cow; and Train, a talking locomotive.⁵^•⁸

From French television to an American dub

The property began as Le Manège Enchanté, a five-minute stop-motion children's show created by Serge Danot and animated by Ivor Wood, which premiered on French television in 1964 and reached Britain the next year as The Magic Roundabout. The BBC's English version, written and narrated by Eric Thompson, a presenter on the children's program Play School, discarded the French scripts and invented new stories from the visuals, and became a multi-generational British hit.²^•⁹

Pathé began production on a CGI feature version in the early 2000s; it premiered in France on February 2, 2005 and in the United Kingdom on February 11, 2005 with a British voice cast including Robbie Williams, Tom Baker, Jim Broadbent, Bill Nighy, Joanna Lumley, Ian McKellen, and Kylie Minogue.²^•⁷ Miramax acquired the North and South American rights, and when Bob and Harvey Weinstein left Miramax to form The Weinstein Company, the US release moved to the new studio.⁷

The Americanization. For US audiences, the lead character Dougal lost his u and gained a second o, becoming Doogal, and nearly the entire British voice cast was replaced with American actors: Whoopi Goldberg took over Ermintrude, Jimmy Fallon replaced Bill Nighy as Dylan, Daniel Tay replaced Robbie Williams in the title role, and Jon Stewart voiced Zeebad.² Only Ian McKellen's performance was retained, and Kylie Minogue re-voiced her own lines with an American accent; the US version also added Kevin Smith as Moose and Judi Dench as narrator.⁷ Butch Hartman, creator of The Fairly OddParents and Danny Phantom, was credited as a screenwriter, and his Americanization replaced Briticisms with American pop-culture gags.¹^•²

Hartman later disowned the result. In 2017 he said the film was originally meant to include a live-action segment similar to The Princess Bride, dropped for budget reasons and replaced by Judi Dench's narration, and that only 3% of his original script survived into the final cut after Harvey Weinstein had it rewritten without his consent, using a script by Cory Edwards.¹⁰^•⁷

Reception

The US version was not screened for critics in advance, and the reviews that followed were scathing.³ Rotten Tomatoes records a 9% Tomatometer from 47 reviews and a 22% audience score from more than 50,000 ratings, with the critics consensus calling it "overloaded with pop culture references, but lacking in compelling characters and plot" and "too simpleminded even for the kiddies".¹ Metacritic lists a Metascore of 23, and the IMDb user rating stands at 2.8/10 from about 5.7K votes.⁴ Christy Lemire of the Associated Press called it "the laziest, most disheartening kind of animated children's film", one that entertains children only through talking animals and flatulence jokes while cramming in pop-culture references for their parents.¹¹

Box office. The film cost $20 million, financed mainly by Pathé, and earned $7,417,319 domestically against $19,273,924 overseas; Rotten Tomatoes lists the US gross as $7.6 million.³^•¹ The original The Magic Roundabout had received passable reviews and performed best in the UK and France.³

Legacy

Doogal is remembered chiefly as a cautionary example of localization. Commentators attribute its failure to the re-editing that added pop-culture and fart jokes to a film that had been received passably abroad, and to celebrity dubbing that replaced the original performances.³^•¹² A DVD Talk review noted the film stood at number 31 on IMDb's user-voted "Bottom 100" list shortly after release.¹² A sequel, The Magic Roundabout: The Beginning, was advertised at the American Film Market in 2008 but was never completed; the animation studio Action Synthese folded after its compulsory liquidation in 2013, and the planned sequel was scrapped.¹³^•⁷ After The Weinstein Company's collapse, the US dub's rights passed to Lantern Entertainment, with Lionsgate handling distribution.⁷

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Films by genre, form, and subject › Animated and short films › Animated films by country and region

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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