There have been a glut on CGI animated features in the last two years. Everyone wants to jump on the Toy Story wagon and get their 100 gazillion dollars. But guess what happened. Most of those movies are crap. Lo and behold animating a bad story, no matter how amazing the animation, produces a bad movie.

I can count on one hand the number of movies I’ve quit watching half way through. Now, among those infamous few, I can include “Happy Feet“. Warner Brothers must have had a colossal advertising budget because the hype for this movie was truly Titanic. But when it came down to it, it was boring! And I don’t mean boring like there was too much time between the good parts. I mean boring like I made it over 30 minutes into the show and there were no good parts. No continuity, no laughs, and no “toe tapping” despite the promotional claims.
I may be in the minority on this one. It did win some awards and what not. But I really thought the whole story was just dumb. The music was … nice … I suppose. I’m not a real fan of musicals, but Tammy is and she was even more disappointed than I was. The characters were very one-dimensional. Rather than try to develop the characters, the script relies on caricatures, so you just know that the Elvis-sounding dad is a fun loving guy who’s not very reliable. You just know that the gang with Mexican accents are party animals. Yeah. Well, that doesn’t really work for me. And the whole “ugly duckling” rip-off plot line was just too weak to support an already weak script.
The animation… one word: Amazing. It’s really beautiful. But like I said, pretty pictures do not a great movie make. Happy Feet made me sad, and for that it gets one grin.

Disney’s latest entry, “Meet the Robinsons“, was less dazzling visually. Don’t get me wrong, it’s still really well done. It just doesn’t raise bar as every previous Pixar movie has. I like the animation. It’s much more classically cartoonish. It doesn’t pretend to be real. It’s just fun. But it didn’t blow me away.

Even without jaw dropping technology, this was a really fun movie. It was fast paced, very witty, full of action and laughs. The complete opposite of Happy Feet. Even though the root moral of the story was the same (Be content to be who you are. Don’t try to be something you’re not.), Robinsons was fun. It was original. It let us be silly. Happy Feet, perhaps, was just too serious all the time. There’s nothing wrong with booger jokes once in a while as long as there’s more to the movie that just booger jokes (*cough*Shrek*cough*).

The characters were pretty well developed (not great, but good enough) and the story allowed you to think a little. I had the “mystery” figured out after about 30 minutes, but that’s how I tend to be. It’s okay as long as I don’t tell Tammy how the movie is going to end when it’s less than half over. That usually gets me a very painful elbow in the ribs.

Over all, it was just what it should have been. A funny, clean movie, with a little suspense and a good moral. (I wonder how much of this improvement in morality stems from the absence if Michael Eisner. Just a thought.) Anyway, this movie easily earns its three grins.

I expected Dreamworks’ “Over the Hedge” to be 90 minutes of tree hugging and fart jokes. The commercials and previews did not impress me at all. But, when I went to the DVD kiosk at the grocery store, Happy Feet was taken. “Oh well. Let’s give it a shot. It’s only 99¢.”

The guys who marketed this should be fired. They lied to me. There was only one green skunk cloud in the whole movie and it was good for the plot, not just a crutch. I was completely taken by surprise. There was absolutely no explicit tree hugging or anti-suburbia finger waging. Instead it was a multi-layered, character heavy plot in which each of the ensemble of characters got their own development and their own chance to teach us a lesson. The over all moral of the story was great, but each character had a lesson to learn. Trust, honesty, self-esteem, tradition, self-control, pride… And to top it all off, it’s just laugh-out-loud funny!

I also didn’t know until I watched the DVD extras that Over the Hedge was based on a comic strip of the same name. That’s always a plus in my book because it usually means that there’s someone who loves the characters driving the creative process, keeping the script true to their original creation.

For once, Dreamworks has put out a movie that I will probably own in the same time frame as a Disney movie I probably won’t own. The animation quality was good, but again, not jaw dropping. They did some pretty impressive work with the fur, but that ground was broken in Monster’s Inc. What they did manage to do was get a lot of really talented comedic voice talent together with a brilliant script. The poked fun at things that are easy to laugh at without hurting anyone’s feelings. (America’s obsession with food and draconian housing associations are always fair game in my book.)

All I can say is that this movie really clicked. It has “it” and for that, I give it four grins.