Robinson Crusoe, that classic story of a sailor stranded on
a deserted island that, over many years of pop culture dissemination, has been
regularly confused with similar stories like Gilligan’s Island. Or, at least,
that’s how my generation has come to understand it. So, possibly as a means to
better educate younger audiences on the matter, today’s film shows a cross
between the literary classic and the animated family film tradition of talking
animals. Yeah, this sounds like a film that needs to exist(!)
The plot: Robinson Crusoe (Yuri Lowenthal) and his dog
Aynsley (Doug Stone), while on a ship exploring the islands, are shipwrecked on
a desert island. With no foreseeable chances of rescue, Crusoe tries to make
himself at home as best he can. However, the animal inhabitants of the island,
among them being Mak the macaw (David Howard Thornton), don’t trust outsiders
and may end up making things difficult for our marooned explorer… that is, if
the stray cats May (Debi Tinsley) and Mel (Jeff Doucette) don’t get to them
first.
This film was animated by nWave Pictures, the same company
who made The House Of Magic a couple years ago, and even shares a director with
that production. Thankfully, this means that it shares House Of Magic’s sense
of energy and vibrancy when it comes to the movement of the characters, which
makes for some decent chase sequences. Unfortunately, in terms of the character
models, this is about as made-for-TV quality as I’ve seen all year in terms of
what actually got a cinematic release. The way this presents itself is kind of
weird, in that most of the characters (the animals, mainly) look closer to
glazed pottery than any kind of computer-generated image. Now, usually, the
prospect of rendering computer images as something more concrete would work to
some degree in showing realistic textures, or at the very least making for a
nice visual style. Here, given how it is quite clearly meant to be animation
much like what is found in most other animated family fare, it just furthers
how cheaply-produced this looks and most likely is.
When dealing with any form of adaptation of a well-known
story, there is a major pitfall that more recent productions have gotten
themselves into. Specifically, the pre-amble where someone (usually a narrator)
says that what you are about to see is the “real” version of the story. Now,
aside from being remarkably pompous in a similar fashion to the most recent iteration of Annie on screen, not to mention inaccurate for reasons that should
be more than obvious, it’s also kind of insulting to the source material. Like,
verging on animated Titanic musical kind of insulting. Don’t get me wrong,
there are no rapping dogs here and the story itself isn’t adapted from a
real-life story, but Crusoe has gained respect as a great literary symbol for a
reason. That reason, incidentally, doesn’t involve talking birds taking the
place of a rescued prisoner.
Now, adherence to the original story isn’t exactly mandated
in any form of media that isn’t a documentary; hell, I freely admit to not
having read the original novel as of writing this review, so don’t expect any
more comparisons between texts. That said, regardless of what came before it,
this film starts out on a horrible footing. When Crusoe first lands on the
island where the majority of the film takes place, he doesn’t know the
intentions of the animals and the animals don’t know his. This translates into
the first half of the film being comprised solely of misunderstandings between
the two groups. Words cannot express how irritating this mode of storytelling
is, especially when it’s done in this limp a fashion. It’s like watching a bad
rom-com, only without the possibility of good chemistry to make the pending
conclusion feel warranted. Here, we’re just waiting for the pin to drop not
because we want it to, but because we know that it will.
Then we get into the second half, where the cats May and Mel
become more prominent as the film’s villains… and it is here that the film’s real problem comes in. For as many times
as the film brings up the possibilities of cannibals and pirates (the latter of
which is represented fairly blandly when it does
show up), this is an incredibly safe film. And when I say “safe”, I mean that
it’s so inoffensive that it becomes utterly boring and, in turn, offensive in
its own right. When the only real threat to our main characters are a litter of
feral cats, tension is pretty much non-existent, meaning that when things
actually start happening, it is near impossible to even care.
All in all, this film is about as useless as it is possible
for a kid’s film to get. The acting is decent and there are maybe one or two
jokes that work, but otherwise this is an embarrassingly cheap production. The
animation is vivid but tacky, the writing is lame and irksome in equal measure
and the 'action' is drastically unengaging because of both the portrayed threat
and the mannerisms of the characters we’re supposed to be rooting for.
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