Oh, nWave Pictures; welcome back, old friend. Having covered
two of this studio’s previous features, and considering their 2013 effort The
House Of Magic was part of my rather formative initial year at this reviewing
biz, I can make a pretty solid claim that they are one of the most unnecessary
animation houses working today.
At their worst, they can provide aggressively annoying
nonsense meant to placate kids, and even when they find their groove, they
usually only end up shining when it comes to animating chase scenes. Everything
else ends up in the realm of dead-eyed plastic (or, in the case of The Wild
Life, dead-eyed pottery). With all this in mind, their latest is somewhat of a
surprise, as it’s definitely a lot riskier than their usual. However, chasing
that risk results in one of the most horrifically misguided ‘family’ films I’ve
ever watched.
Let’s start out nice and easy with the animation, which
shows nWave in a particularly frustrating situation because, in spots, it shows
some of their best work to date. The silent opening showing the titular corgi’s
introduction into the royal household is nicely visualised, there’s a very
brief sequence involving geese in a park at night that squeezes in a surprising
amount of unease in just a few seconds, and in the scene where the corgi ends
up in ‘heaven’, the underwater effects and imagery are quite inspired.
Shame that that’s where the positives end, as the rest of
the film sticks to the company standard for rubbery body proportions, extremely
iffy lip movements on the characters, and the occasional moment where it goes
from ‘pet food commercial’ to ‘first-time experiment with Blender’ in a snap.
The chase scenes admittedly are still good, but with how all-over-the-place the
quality control is, I wouldn’t be surprised if the parts that look good were
cultivated by sheer accident. I can see no other way how the
literally-square-jawed Tyson, voiced by Ray Winstone, ends up looking like he
was salvaged from Freddy Fazbear’s Pizzeria.
The music in this thing sucks too, as the majority of the
background score is quite bland and difficult to even recall, but it becomes
all-too-memorable when it hits its lowest points. There’s the introduction of
Tyson’s girlfriend Wanda, who preludes the first Dog Fight Club scene (yep,
that’s a thing in this; more on that in a bit) by singing The Wanderer, in a
sequence that makes me miss when Ray Sharkey did the same thing in Cop And A
Half. Then there’s a requisite training montage set to what sounds like
Poundland Bill Conti, and just in case that was too subtle, we even get a
rendition of Puppy Love. And a really poorly-sung rendition at that.
As for the story, it’s the pedestrian ‘dog finds their way
back home’ plot, involving the titular corgi being betrayed by one of his
fellow dogs and ending up in a dog pound, which is where the aforementioned
Fight Club takes place. I don’t know what’s worse: The idea that including dog-fighting
in the main plot was considered kosher for a kids’ film, or that it largely
amounts to extremely painful ‘don’t talk about Fight Club’ quips. I’d say it’s
just an excuse to string jokes together, but when one of those jokes is a
remark about a gay man being a ‘queen’, all it does is offend my sensibility as
someone who dislikes tacky-as-fuck jokes.
But that’s pretty much what I’ve come to expect from these
guys. What pushes this into new territory comes with the unexpected cameo that
shows up early on: Donald Trump, with Melania in tow. They’re voiced by
professional actors, admittedly, but yeah, he’s here and the film takes great
pleasure in inflicting all the memes associated with him as possible. There’s a
moment where a teapot gets replaced with a bottle of Covfefe-brand cola for his
arrival, there’s references made about his hair and his hands, and he ends up
leaving the film because the corgi bites his crotch.
I’d be remarking about how instantly-dated this makes the
film, and how lame these jokes ultimately are… excepts there’s another
reference to the real-life Trump that makes its way on-screen. A reference to
Trump’s infamous “grab them by the pussy” remark, here echoed as Trump telling
his own pet corgi to grab some puppy. So much for nWave playing things safe, I
guess.
Now, in all honesty, I don’t have much of an issue with this
in concept. It’s actually pretty daring for a family film, especially coming
from a studio this frequently lacklustre, and it’s worded in just the right way
where it’s likely to get picked up more by adults than kids. His presence in
the film even ends up being the nucleus for a lot of political imagery in the
rest of the film, particularly in Matt Lucas as the Judas dog Charlie and how
his undisputed reign in the royal household exposes some tyrannical tendencies,
ditto for Tyson within the dog pound. It’s quite racy for commentary in a kids’
film, but it seems to have been done with the right intent… at first.
This is where shit gets ugly, because as arguably admirable
as this film is for what it pokes fun at, it seems like they want to have their
sexual abuse cake and eat it too. That moment where Trump is telling his dog to
‘grab some puppy’ I mentioned before? That dog, Mitzi played by Sarah Hadland,
ends up being paired with the titular corgi and… forces him to mate with her.
It plays out like a Pepe LePew short, except even those cartoons didn’t
fixate this much on the actual act.
No, movie. You don’t get to vilify real-life sexual abuse in
one scene, turn it into a running gag afterwards, and then act like it’s okay
because it happens to the villain at the end. Oh, but because it’s between two dogs (or,
if I had to guess, because it’s a female aggressor going after a male), that makes it
perfectly fi- No, it fucking doesn’t!
Say what you will about Show Dogs, at least they had enough
sense to remove their own problematic scene, and they didn’t think they were
making a righteous point in its initial inclusion.
Between the involvement of nWave Pictures and the inclusion
of everyone’s favourite peach boy Donnie, I was really not expecting anything
out of this. But while there are some brief instances of improvement over their
past material, the treatment of the subject matter and its ill-advised attempts
at political commentary are fucking nightmarish in how badly they turn out.
And to make matters worse, I can easily see this becoming
the latest strawman defence for the real-life example of abuse allegations,
going for a “oh, it’s okay when you joke about it” rebuttal. It’s not
just bad, it might end up arming the very people it wants to lampoon, which is
the death knell of satire, as limp as it is here. Well done, writers of Gnomeo
& Juliet: You’ve managed to find a whole plateau for wrong-headed arrogance.
Congratulations. Now kindly piss off and don’t try this shit again until you’ve
actually thought it through first.
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