'Nutcracker: The Motion Picture' (G)

WITH animal epics like "The Black Stallion" and "Never Cry Wolf" behind him, Carroll Ballard is more attuned to paws than pas de deux. The proof is in "Nutcracker: The Motion Picture," his galloping maladaptation of the dance classic as revised by the Pacific Northwest Ballet.

Here, the "Waltz of the Flowers" looks less like a dance than a cattle drive, the ballerinas a stampede of tutus, the camerawork obscuring the choreography of Kent Stowell and wife Francia Russell. It's as if Ballard were covering an NBA game.

Call me an old fuddy-duddy, but I like to see a dancer's feet. And in a pas de deux, I like to see both of the dancers all the time, every bit of them -- to see the sculptural shapes their bodies make, the muscular nuance, the startling grace. But Ballard and photographer Stephen Burum crop off arms and legs and close in on sternums and scapulae. In an urge to innovate, these two have created a "Nutcracker" from the knees up. And that's a shame, because this novel version by Stowell and Maurice Sendak deserves to be seen.

Sendak, writer and illustrator of children's books, designs the fantastical sets and bases the story on E.T.A. Hoffman's original fairytale, "The Nutcracker and the Mouse King." The music is still Tchaikovsky. But look elsewhere for your sugarplum fairies. The themes here confront darker dreams of childhood -- the heroine Clara's sexual awakening, the sibling rivalry between Clara and her horrid little brother Fritz, and the ambiguity of her relationship with her godfather Herr Dr. Drosselmeier.

Hugh Bigney creates the dual roles of the leering toymaker Drosselmeier and the exotic Pasha, master of Clara's fantasies. In her dreams, he delights and bedevils her with creatures he lashes into dance

-- a bird of paradise, a great stuffed tiger, twirling dervishes. The costumes are magnificent and the sets inspired -- clocks that become gargoyles and dollhouses big enough for life-size ballerinas.

Thirteen-year-old Vanessa Sharp plays the adolescent Clara, a bittersweet beauty torn between her toy Nutcracker and the prince of her dreams. Patricia Barker, the elegant ballerina who dances the grown-up dream Clara, is squired by Wade Walthall, who makes a swarthy, swashbuckling Nutcracker Prince. The familiar music is performed by the London Symphony Orchestra conducted by Sir Charles Mackerras.

The new psychology of the plot and the nightmarish characterizations are enough to keep you interested, especially if you've tired of the candy-coated kiddie version. Obviously Ballard hopes to make it all more exciting by photographing the dance from arcane angles -- sky-cam to toe-cam. But he misses the pointe.

NUTCRACKER: THE MOTION PICTURE (G) -- At area theaters.