Crapshoot 2017: Atrocities of Animation

 

Find the works of Illumination a little too dignified? Look no further for shoddy child distractions than here.

All things considered, 2016 was not only a great year for animation but a surprising improvement in the field in general over the last couple of years.

While “Finding Dory” may have cemented Pixar’s acceptance of being knocked down from their self-imposed pedestal to imperfect yet highly talented craftsman, Dreamworks continues to under-deliver on their creative potential (excluding some of the surprise hits to come from their Netflix dealings) and Cartoon Network begins to foster a reputation of being stale, what little “sad” aspects occurred last year were generally drowned out by quality products, at least if your name wasn’t DC comics.

The Disney animated cannon received 2 great additions this year, one of sits among the annals of the best works that it’s produced, Laika created a technical masterpiece that may be their opus whether or not they stay financially afloat, and even Illumination Studios has managed to step their game up a bit, producing the type of fun and poppy fluff that Dreamworks used to be able to churn out in their sleep.

With such a strong showing on even the weakest of entries, the duds only serve to shine in their suck that much more.

Rob Schneider was an A-list celebrity. Until one day, people stopped caring.

Now, in order to gain back his relevance, he has to become a cartoon polar bear. Unfortunately for him, the audience is about to learn that his grand comeback ain’t that great.

From the shambles of the formerly great Mainframe Entertainment, Rob Schneider is “The Polar Bear.” Rated PG-13.

Joking of Schneider’s career aside, watching him get mauled by a live polar bear would have been far more entertaining and less of a waste of time than what very well may be the most bizarre display of animated awfulness to see release last year.

The other film that we will be looking at, though equally odd in its conception, at least has the excuse of foreign influence dictating its strange evolution to realization.

“Norm of the North” follows the titular arctic mammal, a loser in his community with the inexplicable ability to speak human English, on a journey to New York City to convince the head of a billion dollar Housing Corporation to abort his plans of building Condo communities in the Arctic. His plans take an unexpected turn when he becomes a media sensation and the spokesperson for said company in an effort to convince them not to build.

One of the most noteworthy benefits of animation is that because you are visually constructing every shot of the world from the ground up, it frees you from the constraints of reality as we know it with regards to storytelling; things that you couldn’t quite pull off convincingly in live action are more palatable on the canvas of a world that simulates our own but doesn’t exactly replicate it.

The creators of “Norm of the North” would appear to be under the impression that this means no rules of consistency need to apply to their production; anything goes for the sake of the endgame.

The mere idea that somebody would tackle environmentalism with a pro-environmental message about a talking bear trying to convince nobody to set up gentrified housing in the Arctic sounds like a parody the likes of Matt Stone and Trey Parker wish that they had the brilliance to conceive of. However, even the absurdity of any provided synopsis covering how ludicrous the mere idea of gentrifying the arctic is cannot accurately translate into words just how insanely conceived and connected the chain of events that formulate the plot of this film are.

Its incoherence and randomness would be comparable to the end results of a game of Madlibs were it not for the fact that Madlibs is at simple in the nonsense that it generates. I’ve never seen something so simultaneously stupid yet structurally convoluted.

“Norm of the North” has all of the hallmarks of a vanity project gone painfully south. Painful children’s media 101 writing aside (despite the bizarre mismatch of content and themes), the film seems to be visibly proud of the product that its shilling.

What makes this so flabbergasting though is how little went into anything that the filmmakers should be proud of.

Giving credit where it’s due, Schneider does show that he may have the potential chops for voice acting but there’s nothing particularly unique or even endearing about Norm. The most infamous claim to fame the film has, its forced “sensation,” the Arctic Shuffle, some bizarre bastard born of an awkward one night stand between the running man and twerking, would have elicited immediate groans of irritation from me were I not just confused at why they were so proud of it, leading to the film’s biggest problem.

"Norm of the North” is such a blatant direct to video production that I can only imagine that whatever executive thought it was worth putting in theaters in all of its low budget “glory” is a future Darwin Award winner waiting to achieve his potential.

“Norm of the North” would have gone completely ignored and under the radar were it not for the fact that for some godforsaken reason, its producers chose to go theatrical with it. It’s existence is the result of a bizarre mix of decision-making that almost resembles marketing logic but never quite comes together the way you would expect.

“The Wild Life” is nearly the polar opposite; it comes off as more of a checklist of everything foreign marketers think that they can sell internationally, which in turn becomes everything creatively bankrupt executives think they can effectively market to the lowest common denominator of children domestically.

Low brow humor and slapstick? Check. Aimless plot? Check. Corner cutting on texture rendering? In spades. Just about the only thing they didn’t do was load the voice cast with A-list celebrities, instead using actual professional voice actors, raising the question of why they bothered to do a theatrical release for this until you realize that hiring Rob Schneider and Ken Jeong onto “Norm of the North” was apparently a decent chunk of a 20 million dollar budget so why bother dishing out the cash for something with no longevity.

The biggest mystery surrounding “The Wild Life” is why it bothered to base itself on “Robinson Crusoe?”

I don’t even pose that question in any form of offensive manner, I just literally fail to grasp why they felt it necessary to use a piece of 18^th century English literature as fuel for a cartoon about the hijinks of a bunch of animals and a traveler on a tropical island.

If anything, the retitling of this film from “Robinson Crusoe” for its North American release may have helped me better swallow the pill because had they changed the name of its central character, I would have barely noticed the difference.

That mystery may very well be the only noteworthy thing about the film in the long run however, because while “The Wild Life” is far from good, about the nicest thing that I can really say about it is that it is almost pleasantly forgettable.

Unlike “Norm of the North” which snapped back and forth between unbearable (no pun intended) and fascinatingly disorganized, this one just kind of had me mentally zoning out save for the occasional plot twist brought about by the villains of the film who come so far out of left field that I honestly don’t want to even reveal them or the third act that they become key to. The sheer WTF factor of it all is just about the only reason one should even bother glancing this film.

Even if you just need a babysitting video for the children, there are plenty of better distractions that you can sit them through, released in 2016 or otherwise.