Tag: animation

Dub’s Take: Ne Zha 2 & Night of the Zoopocalypse

Two Spoiler-Free Family-Friendly Micro Movie Reviews

NE ZHA 2

3.5 out of 5

I’m a cultured guy: my favourite movie has a naked French lady in it. But “Ne Zha 2” is a movie from China, rooted in its mythology, without conceding to a global audience.

Despite every barrier to enjoyment possible (I haven’t seen the first film; super-quick & error-ridden subtitles; what I thought would be a 10 minute recap being a 30 second ‘last time on’; did I say fast subtitles?), Ne Zha 2 earned my part of its astonishing $2 billion in global profit through spectacle & gut reaction alone.

Who cares if the human characters are animated out of a PS2-era musou game, or if the whole third act reminded me of twenty seconds from “Akira”? Highlights include a scene with photorealistic gophers that almost made me throw up in the theatre; a heroic sacrifice that had me teary-eyed (only for a late twist to make me realize I didn’t actually know what was going on); and my 73-year-old father enjoying it, too.

I don’t foresee an English dub being possible without huge script revisions, and 10 minutes of Coles Notes at the beginning.

NIGHT OF THE ZOOPOCALYPSE

2.5 out of 5

Being a writer, I know what it’s like to fall in love with your words, whether those be poeticisms, a sudden revelation, or building to a literary crescendo.

“Night of the Zoopocalypse’s” scribes didn’t think objectively enough when it came to divvying traits out to its protagonists. The cinema-loving lemur Xavier won’t shut up about film theory as it pertains to every situation (like the critic from Shyamalan’s “Lady in the Water”), but capybara Frida is stuck reiterating that she doesn’t know anything because she’s “just a capybara.” Not a great start for a comedy that relies on the camaraderie of its core team.

But kids probably won’t care, so I’m trying not to, either. Zoopocalypse is a quick, cute time, most successful in its visual details than story ones. Gracie’s voice-actress Gabbi Kosmidis says in the pre-show that it’s a good entryway for young horror fans-to-be, and while that’s just a publicity quote to get butts in seats, I don’t disagree on its sanitized zombie-movie status, with enough neon colours & felty CGI fuzz to keep everyone entertained.

Some of the soundtrack was a little weird and could be triggering for kids with hearing sensitivity.

Posters sourced from impawards.com (1; 2). Are you going to see either of these? Do you agree that everything yanks something from Akira at one point or another? Let us know your impressions in the comments below!

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Dub’s Take: The Wild Robot (2024)

A spoiler-free mini movie review.

3 out of 5

“The Wild Robot” was emotionally touching enough to earn my tears: that alone is worth a minimum star rating. But I thought I would be getting a wholesome, feel-good family film for general audiences, without any intercalated adult ‘baggage’ – would you believe producers found a way to sexualize one of the villains here, too? But I don’t have the word count to go over everything.

I cannot stress this enough: Wild Robot contains a vast amount of dialogue about death & dying, played mostly for laughs. Characters commiserate whether or not they’re about to croak on a minute-to-minute basis. A family of possums ask if they’ll be “murdered” before one of them is killed off-screen. For my 36-year-old self, it was extremely noticeable.

Sidebar: back in grade school, I wrote a play for a class Christmas concert. My first draft was rejected because the teacher didn’t like the bad guy telling the good guys he was going to “kill” them. But one of my favourite Xmas movies is “Home Alone”, and they spoke similarly in that movie, didn’t they? Worse, even: Joe Pesci says he’s going to bite Macaulay Culkin’s fingers off, and it was rated PG.

Obviously Home Alone isn’t germane to that teacher’s holiday movie marathon, but the real takeaway was that every parent has a different idea of what’s appropriate for their child and what isn’t – in their experience/opinion. I understand that Wild Robot’s story transpires in the untamed outdoors, and that finding your place in the circle of life – how & while you can – is a theme of the film, but there’s a difference between an effective implication of danger versus the definitiveness of death.

The only reason to keep regurgitating something in scripted lines is to underline to the audience how important it is. Today’s prepubescents can’t be so uneducated that a nice family movie already containing potent scenes of peril should have to push nonexistence to the front of their consciousness, too. Certainly the film’s trailers didn’t foreshadow it.

Wild Robot has one shot where the heroes are looking for survivors of a snowstorm, and silently, it conveys that what they found isn’t good. It’s less than ten whole seconds, but does a better job of communicating grief to an impressionable group, without forcing anything, than the other 90 minutes do. A shame, that.

Poster sourced from impawards.com. What do you think? Imagine this scenario: you have two family movies (not Wild Robot). Both movies have a main character die off-screen, and both will inevitably inspire a difficult conversation between (a) parent(s) & their child(ren). In one movie, the death is constantly referred to non-stop in the dialogue after it happens, reinforcing that this person is no longer around. The other movie implies the other characters’ sorrow & grief through facial expressions & behaviour, though their true, vocalized emotion is ultimately left up to audience interpretation. Which movie would you rather have incited the conversation with your child? Let’s talk in the comments below.

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Dub’s Take: Despicable Me 4 (2024)

A spoiler-free mini movie review.

NO STAR RATING

Poppy Prescott gives me impure thoughts.

You’ve heard of Disney animators slipping naughty easter-eggs into their features. These were blink-and-you’ll-miss-‘em moments you’d catch on repeat viewings: there was no way anything more than a few milliseconds of indiscretion could make it passed pre-2000 executives; a ratings board; test audiences; and any other stop-gaps preceding a theatrical release.

But Disney doesn’t ride today’s market solo anymore, and – speaking generally – the competition is becoming more shameless for your dollar. This isn’t to say modern family movies are inundated with sex & violence: I’m not that out of touch. But you can crack a specially-worded joke in a diplomatic way and still keep your coveted PG rating.

Case-in-point: “Despicable Me 4″‘s Poppy. As voiced by Joey King (who just headlined Netflix’s “Uglies”), Poppy is a bratty, overprivileged redhead, sporting a skirt; braces; freckles; and a lisp, and who blackmails & uses Gru… for a heist! Poppy’s age isn’t explicitly stated but I trust my ten-second Google search that labelled her 14.

King’s voice work is chipper and snotty: just how it needs to be. But Poppy doesn’t speak until three-scenes-in, after she’s already thrown Gru knowing glances that communicate, as per the plot, that she knows his secret identity. But all I saw in these lingering shots were Alicia Silverstone from “The Crush” or Drew Barrymore from “Poison Ivy”: villains from a special androcentristic subsection of 90’s erotic thrillers that revolved around psychotic, hypersexual adolescent homewreckers.

My post-secondary discipline was live-action film – not animation. The closest my practice ever got was having to re-record dialogue when a covert HVAC system went off in the background of a shot. In that case, the intention of the scene had already been established. We just did the audio again: somewhere quiet, and hopefully to the same level of emotion as the video. What I want to know then is whether DM4’s visual creatives told King about their non-verbal goals for Poppy before she recorded the dialogue, or if King found out what they did at the premiere while everyone around her made the same lewd joke about what they were seeing.

There’s no way an innocent kid in the audience is detecting a sexual undercurrent in their new Minions movie. That’s just for us mature adult credit card holders.

Poster sourced from impawards.com. If you even care at this point, the overall movie was fine: the Minions do their thing; voice-leads Steve Carell & Will Ferrell do their thing; and there’s a madcap energy that keeps the pace moving even when the comedy fell on the ears of the wrong demographic. If I had to give it a proper star rating, I’d throw it a 2 out of 5. Anything to add to the conversation? That’s what the comment box below is for!

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