“It’s for kids.” Three words comprising one of the foulest excuses for lacking quality in the entertainment industry.
It’s only natural that entertainment designed for
the younger and less wise contain less potential complexity than a story aimed
at audiences with a full grasp on the pleasures and difficulties that life and
society can offer but at the end of the day, bad is bad. Regardless of whomever
your audience was meant to be or how discerning they are, there’s a difference
between run of the mill and poor.
None face subjugation to the excuse of demographics
more than children’s animation, making the animated movies that do receive a
substantial critical backlash all the more noteworthy.
2014 may have been a better year for animation than
the last couple of years but a few exemplary lazy productions have stood out
from others. Of these films is the story of a squirrel’s desire to rob a nut shop,
a business so oddly specific that I had to Google the concept to see if it was
a real thing, in order to provide himself with enough food for the winter while
learning to get along with the suburban community of animals that have
ostracized his drive for independent action.
There’s almost nothing that can really be said about
“The Nut Job” that its marketing hasn’t done already. Of this movie’s many
flaws, dishonesty is not one of them.
Half baked story with forced last minute character
development to put up the veneer of having a moral? Check. Pointless celebrity
voice cast? Double check. Animation direction emphasizing quick camera cutting
and high energy emotions lacking in subtlety? Triple check. Add in the half
baked rendering on the final animations that make the CG models look like some
sort of awkward, shiny, artificial figurines and the pushing of a pop song
whose shelf life expired over a year before its initial release, and you have a
movie that is probably more of an unintentional parody of modern mainstream western
animated films than the “Madagascar” franchise.
It’s cheap, pedestrian, and forgettable, which is
probably the nicest thing that I can say about it.
The only thing that’s
particularly notably bad about it beyond its lack of ambition is that it is apparently
supposed to be a 1950s-60s period piece, which bafflingly has nothing to do
with its story or presentation. Hell, I barely even picked up on it the first
time I watched it until somebody I know commented on the fact. It seems like an
odd thing to focus on but I implore you to watch the trailer, if nothing else,
and tell me if you can even remotely differentiate its setting from the modern
day. “The Nut Job” is aesthetically at war with its own
tale but the only reason this is a factor is because these aesthetics come at
play in contradictory ways later on that are entirely unnecessary.
Focusing on
this flaw is probably giving the film
more attention than it deserves though so for now I simply implore all to stay
away and hopefully, just hopefully, we can work towards making the coming its
future 2016 sequel the box office bomb
that this film deserved to be, lest we get a Korean produced “Madagascar” on
our hands for the foreseeable future.
Where “The Nut Job” is unambitiously lazy however, “Legends
of Oz: Dorothy’s Return” is one of the strangest miscalculations of animated
moviemaking that I have ever come across in my life.
With “Oz: The Great and Powerful’s” mild success, I
guess somebody wanted to jump on a predicted “Wizard of Oz” resurgence. I’m not
exactly sure if that resurgence is around the corner or not but I do have to
laugh at the notion that anybody even remotely thought that this could be a
satisfying enough to ride the bandwagon.
Watching “Legends of Oz” gave me an odd sense of Déjà
vu harkening my experience watching “The Legend of Hercules.”
Had this been a direct to video production, I can’t
help but feel I would almost be mildly praising it for going slightly beyond
the call of duty. It’s grand failing is in the fact that it somehow got a nationwide
theatrical release in a month dominated by a Spider-Man, X-Men and Godzilla
film.
Unlike “The Legend of Hercules” however, I am still struggling to this
day to erase the unpleasantness of its nonsensical storyline driven by nightmare
inducingly creepy and soulless looking character models from my memory.
Despite “The Nut Job’s” critical laziness, it was
competent enough while utilizing enough resources to look like a theatrical
release, despite failing to be a good one. “Legends of Oz” goes up in smoke the
second it starts. It’s not a good sign when the least cheap CG apparently
exists within the opening credits.
It’s an even worse sign when the film is framed as a
direct sequel to The Wizard of Oz, yet everything in Kansas, Dorothy’s dress
style included, belongs aesthetically within the last decade. Right from the get
go, the movie looks insultingly cheap and can’t even keep its own mythology
straight on either end of the story.
In a twisted way, I would almost recommend it. It’s
not every day you come across one of the biggest box-office flops of recent
history so even the few audience members that knew of the film could tell that
something rotten was afoot. Assuming you can bear the nightmarish thought of
strolling through the uncanny valley, I can’t deny how fascinated I was with
getting to the bottom of how something with such little thought and effort
could have possibly seen release in over 2500 theaters across America.
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