Yep. It’s another one. There must be some inherently masochistic part of my brain that is still willing to sit through these things, as there’s no rational reason why I should be here today, presenting a write-up for another bloody talking animal movie. I used to justify this as part of my larger want to expose myself to every new film I can, so that I could potentially find some gems that I wouldn’t have watched otherwise… but it is growing increasingly rarer for that to yield positive results with this subset of movies. So, for my readers who haven’t grown bored of me trotting out this cloud-of-powder-in-the-shape-of-a-dead-horse just yet, time to take another turn on the world’s ugliest carousel.
I feel like I need to scoop out my own eyeballs and put them
in some cold water because this CGI hurts to look at. The texture
quality is pretty average for these movies, along with my greatest pet peeve
that is water looking absolutely nothing like water, and the lip sync is
complete garbage. Like, right from the literal first word said by the film’s
de-facto villain, it instantly looks wrong. The cutscenes in Rayman 3
were better aligned than what we get here, meaning that along with the annoying
voice acting, the act of watching the characters speak is just as
irritating, if not more so.
Which is a hell of a feat when the main character is voiced
by none other than Pauly Shore, the man responsible for some of the worst
comedy films of all time. His gruffer delivery means we aren’t subjected to the
same kind of eardrum-rupturing screeches that so heavily populated his
early-to-mid-90s work, but the rest of the cast make up for that with ample
levels of shrillness. It’s more “single jokes are the same thing as
personalities, right?” shit with everyone in the main group, from Shore’s
Mic-Mic basically being a furrier version of Shrek, Oscar the rocketeer rabbit,
Duke the aggressively annoying pelican, Janus the Gollum wolf, and Amur the
tiger poet. I shouldn’t have to tell you that those character descriptions are
themselves more interesting than anything they actually say or do, but… yeah, that’s
what we get here.
It doesn’t help that this film struggles to fill in
less-than-90-minutes of screen time, to the point where the levels of artistic
theft on display reaches new heights (or lows, depending on your viewpoint) for
the sub-genre. Aside from the ‘loner learns to have friends’ arc for Mic-Mic,
you’ve got the mis-matched band of animals trying to return a baby to his
parents (Ice Age), Oscar turning his own house into a flying machine (Up), the
main plot involving a delivery mishap with a stork (Storks), not to mention
said mishap involving a baby panda (Kung Fu Panda).
I’d honestly be a lot more annoyed by all that, if it
weren’t for how evident it is that this film needed all the ‘assistance’
it could get because they clearly can’t tell a story on their own. Astoundingly
drawn-out scenes, most of which go exactly nowhere, a bunch of character quirks
that ultimately add nothing to the larger story or even to the characters
themselves, and even a moment where they rewind the footage just to
artificially bulk out the run time. The desperation on display is evident right
from the first scene, as not only does the lip sync hideousness make itself
known immediately, its depiction of a snake wheel that three monkeys use as a
moving treadmill is the first, last and only time the animation provides
something interesting. And even then, it’s so brief as to be largely useless.
So yeah, to the surprise of hopefully no-one who has read my
reviews before, this film sucks. Big time. While it lacks any outright heinous
moments, like the more alarming bits from The Queen’s Corgi, or a prevailing
vibe that the story is being wasted, like with The Jungle Bunch, that’s only
because there isn’t nearly enough actually happening in-film for either
of those possibilities to exist in. The strongest reaction this got out of me
was a moment of surprise that they didn’t rip off the finale to Toy Story 3, as
it’s pretty much the only thing from more popular animation studios that this
film didn’t swipe.
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