Look up in the sky! It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s an egotistical human being bearing an American flag on his shoulder!

If only the self-absorbed astronaut could phone home when he realized he was not in Kansas anymore. Instead, the big brute finds himself creating rebel-like alliances with a select few social outcasts and misfits in order to escape the wrath of this newly “discovered” civilization and return to a more “normal” life-form on Planet Earth.

Indeed, the American astronaut (voiced by Dwayne Johnson) finds himself playing the stereotypical space explorer in Planet 51, an everyday, run-of-the-mill animated sci-fi flick geared toward entertaining the younger masses during the impending holiday season – and, for some reason, that totally works out fine.

Sure, the latest Sony release makes a million references to a whole slew of sci-fi related films – like Star Wars, E.T., Wall-E and Aliens, to name a few – and it totally lacks in originality. Heck, at times, moviegoers of a certain age group sometimes feel as if they were taken back in time and sitting in a 1985 theater watching the first installment of Back to the Future.

Yet, despite the fluid use of references to other wildly successful films (sci-fi, comedy, or otherwise), Planet 51 is actually quite the entertaining film, especially when one considers it is quite the parody on human paranoia here on Earth with respect to alien life forms.

That lovely role reversal takes shape on a far-flung planet in some distant universe, where cute little green “aliens” live in a 1950s-style community, complete with malt shops, classic muscle cars, picket-fence homes, single-screen theaters and doo-wop music. Not to be confused with the ogre-like being in Shrek, these little green figures resemble us humans in many ways – not only do they fear the invasion of any living form beyond their atmosphere (who, of course, only invade Planet 51 to turn the entire population into brain-dead zombies), but they also speak English.

Our beloved American astronaut questions this when he first hears his soon-to-be ally (voiced by Justin Long) speak, but he quickly accepts the lack of language barrier and moves on to answering the ultimate question – how does he deal with a population who knows of his presence, feeds into all things McCarthyism, thinks his spaceship to be a UFO and fears him to be a mind-controller?

Stranded, the astronaut has to find a way to rely on his probing computer (a la Wall-E) and a few unlikely friends (including a teenage girl, voiced by Jessica Biel, who is willing to do anything to buck trends and be “different,” in a hippie kind of way) in order to escape his peril and return home a “hero.”

While Planet 51 seems to be a re-hash of every major sci-fi movie produced in the last thirty years, the computer-animated film will definitely entertain the young ones for the 91 minutes they spend restlessly sitting in their theater seats. Of course, since there is not much really inventive or original about the film, Planet 51 will not be too memorable beyond this winter season, even factoring in the short-attention-spanned audience that this film is geared for. What this film lacks in uniqueness, it makes up for in heart and overall feel-goodness.

Ultimately, Planet 51 is a film that is best watched with at least one person age 12 or younger in order to be fully entertaining and plausible. Featuring the voices of Johnson, Long, Biel, Gary Oldman, Seann William Scott and John Cleese, Planet 51 is directed by Jorge Blanco, co-directed by Javier Abad and Marcos Martinez, and written by Joe Stillman.

The Sony Pictures release opens today and is rated PG (mild vulgar language).