The third instalment of the pre-teen cultural phenomenon and the first to be released in cinemas: is High School Musical 3: Senior Year toxic cheese or harmless propaganda? Little kids want to be big kids: the out-of-nowhere global success of the High School Musical series is down to the five-to-nine year olds who aspire to the all-singing, all-dancing teens on the screen. The psychotic funk of adolescence is scrubbed down with wire wool and presented to the pre-pubescent audience as a joyously cool time of togetherness, first love and song.

The factions of the American high school are here - the jocks, the emos, the brainiacs, the preppies - but they all get along. Adolescence is tribal and primal, bursting with sex and violence and paranoia. Not here. As served up for younger brothers or sisters, it is merely cool, a dream of innocence floated by High School Musical 3: Senior Year.

Not all parents like it. Let‘s not be mealy mouthed about it. Middle class liberal mums and dads instinctively cringe at the sight of their little ones being caught up in this imported cult. It‘s not just knee-jerk anti-Americanism; the same reservations exist amongst the great and the good of the USA. And it is not that High School Musical prematurely exposes their babies to bad behaviour. A safer, more unthreatening and chaste movie is hard to imagine - it makes March Of The Penguins look like Salo, Or The 120 Days Of Sodom. (Ah, if only Pasolini‘s filthy obsessive movie had featured penguins instead of Nazis). It‘s not even that the film comes with landfills of merchandising: we loved WALL-E didn‘t we? So what‘s the problem? My six-year old daughter accompanied me to the screening. This much we knew beforehand: Troy is the hero and the boy with the brown hair. Gabriella is his girlfriend. "Have you seen either of the other two High School Musical films," I asked.

"I‘ve only seen a bit of High School Musical 2," my daughter confessed.

I was surprised. "But you talk about them all the time!"

She shrugged. She has playground knowledge of the films. Actual viewing is not required. Let‘s get her opinion on the film out of the way first, before I hold forth at length in an inappropriate and unwanted fashion, like all fathers. She liked it. Not as good as WALL-E, mind. We agreed that the dance number ‘The Boys Are Back‘ in which Troy and his friend Chad re-enact their boyhood games in a scrapyard was the best bit.

The rest of the audience was reserved. High School Musical 3: Senior Year has no villain, no tension, no drama whatsoever - suspense is treated like a sexual swearword, something the young need to be protected from. "Helicopter parenting" is the phrase that describes the anxious hovering that modern parents do around their offspring, always on hand to save them from themselves. High School Musical 3 has passed through the kidneys of an entire PTA of helicopter parents, strained and purified to keep it safe.

Unfortunately the effect of all that dilution is the creation of something that exists outside of life, art or nature; in short, propaganda. High School Musical 3 is a dispatch from the Department For The Promotion Of Teamwork And The Indoctrination Of The Young In The Importance of Keeping In Line With Your Peers. All this talk of teamwork reminds you of American football in which the team moves remorselessly up the field toward the touchdown. Likewise, holding the line - regardless of lifestyle choices or ethnicity - is what the choreographed dance numbers express. The Breakfast Club made a similar point in an edgier fashion (and compared to High School Musical, the works of John Hughes are Pasolini), breaking down the barriers between the teen tribes so that the bad boy and the queen bee walk away together. Maybe all Hollywood films push this same message, and it only seems so dominant in High School Musical because all the distractions of interesting-stuff-actually-happening have been removed.

The students exist in a bubble of entitlement. Their obstacles are well-meaning parental expectations and the agony of choosing between a music or basketball scholarship. Sharpay Evans (Tisdale), an ambitious celebrity wannabe, is given a silver tea spoon to stir things up with, but is treated with such fond indulgence that she is far from the villain we require.

Around the end of the second act, traditionally the point at which the odds seem hopelessly stacked against the hero, the filmmakers make us feel vaguely sad by sending Troy out to sing in the rain. He wants to live his dream, not the dream of his dad, you see. He has to choose between dreams. No mention of nightmares. It has all the exquisite tension of dithering over whether to have the cake or the ice cream.

The only villain here is puberty. Our heroes must get old and get on with their lives, and so will the audience, eventually. For now, this fact of life is meaningless to the pre-teen audience. My daughter and I spotted the seeding of High School Musical: The Next Generation, with Troy and Gabrielle and Sharpay‘s replacements waiting in the wings, but there was little excitement at the prospect, merely a weary acknowledgement that the show will go on so long as the numbers stack up.