DRAW, PARDNER - BEFORE WE SWITCH TO CGI.

Byline: Glenn Whipp Film Critic

BRIGHT AND POPPY with enough catchy songs to make you want to buy the soundtrack (and tolerate your kids listening to it a couple of hundred times), ``Home on the Range'' is Disney's last stand in the corral of traditional animation, and if the studio doesn't go out with guns blazing, at least it doesn't wind up on Boot Hill.

This animated Western isn't aiming for meaning or truth with a capital T. It just wants to make you laugh, which it does in places, and leave the theater with a couple of Alan Menken's melodies lodged in your brain. Its main characters - three cows looking to save a ranch facing foreclosure - aren't the most memorable of creations, but there is a great yodeling villain and an old coot jackrabbit sidekick that would make Gabby Hayes proud. Good enough.

The classic critters-saving-the-day story has the trio of cows, Maggie (voiced by Roseanne Barr, who, I imagine, does her own belching - there's much belching in this movie), Mrs. Caloway (Judi Dench, who does not belch) and Grace (Jennifer Tilly), trying to capture a greedy outlaw named Alameda Slim (Randy Quaid), collect the reward money and save their beloved farm.

Little do the bovines know (but then, unless you're a ``Far Side'' believer, you probably would agree that cows don't know much to begin with - that's what distinguishes them as cows), Alameda Slim is a varmint who rustles cattle with a hypnotizing yodeling serenade that owes debts to Hank Williams and Beethoven. That - and, well, the fact that, once again, these are cows we're talking about - puts our heroines at risk.

Everybody wants Slim. A bounty hunter named Rico (Charles Dennis, obviously inspired by Clint Eastwood's Man With No Name) and a karate-kicking horse named Buck (Cuba Gooding Jr.) are also on his trail, looking for the reward. (Though for Buck, it's more about redemption, but not so much the gooey, formulaic kind as the loopy, I'm-going-to-show-you variety.)

Directors Will Finn and John Sanford maintain a brisk pace, and the movie has at least one bravura animation sequence, Alameda Slim's psychedelic yodeling roundup, weirdly fantastic and eye-popping in the tradition of Dumbo's ``Pink Elephants'' and the Winnie the Pooh's ``Heffalumps and Woozles'' nightmare. And the song, the wonderfully named ``Yodel-Adle-Eedle-Idle-Oo,'' is a toe-tapper, too.

In fact, Menken and lyricist Glenn Slater have come up with a few winners here, most notably ``Little Patch of Heaven,'' the instant-classic, Western-swing ditty superbly sung by k.d. lang. Besides introducing you to the setting and most of the characters, the song serves as a signpost to the movie's agreeably sunny vibe. Seldom is heard a discouraging word, don't you know? And, as a change of pace, that's not such a bad thing.

Glenn Whipp, [phone]

glenn.whipp(at)dailynews.com

HOME ON THE RANGE - Three stars

(PG: brief mild rude humor)

Starring: Voices of Roseanne Barr, Judi Dench, Jennifer Tilly, Randy Quaid, Cuba Gooding Jr.

Director: Will Finn and John Sanford.

Running time: 1 hr. 16 min.

Playing: Wide release.

In a nutshell: Not quite a little patch of heaven, but it'll do.

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Photo:

Maggie the cow (voice of Roseanne Barr) makes a friend on the farm in Disney's ``Home on the Range,'' which may be the final traditionally animated offering from the studio.