Almost three months after it appeared in US theaters, The Muppets finally opened here in the UK in time for the school break. Which also coincides with my birthday, so my special treat this year was going out to see The Muppets with family.

And it was the perfect birthday movie. Despite all the good things I’d heard about the film, I was still fairly cynical as to whether the new team would be able to pull off a movie that would be respectful to the love that Jim Henson used to instill in the characters.

But they did. Despite the absence of some of the original Muppeteers and the introduction of new characters, the movie felt very much as if it had been lovingly crafted by Jim, as opposed to some of the more bland attempts to keep the Muppet name alive with adaptations of other works. Steve Whitmire and Dave Goelz survive from the Henson era and while Frank Oz may have been replaced by Eric Jacobson, the gang still feels very much intact - perhaps even more than they have for years, with long-lost characters like Marvin Suggs, Uncle Deadly, Beauregard, Sweetums and Link Hogthrob popping up during the course of the movie.

So much credit to Jason Segel, who wrote and co-stars in the movie and Flight of the Conchords’ Bret McKenzie, who wrote the catchy songs, for reviving the Muppets, but also understanding that no reinvention was required. While the movie’s clever, it’s never too knowing and while it’s wonderfully sentimental, it’s never too cloying. It’s a tricky mix that only Pixar seem to have been able to pull off in recent decades. However, The Muppets haven’t been this pure since Muppets Take Manhattan. 

It’s like someone wrote a love letter to my childhood and Jim Henson and put it on the big screen. And the fact that my niece adored it as well shows that nostalgia didn’t outweigh making the movie appeal to kids too. This was family entertainment in the truest sense of the phrase.