Gregs Tagebuch: Von Idioten umzingelt!

They don't add anything to the diary of a wimpy kid universe. This movie is the definition of lazy cash grab remakes. Not only does it not hold up to the original book but also to the original movie. They stripped everything that made the book and the original movie funny and special. Avoid this plz if you love the original books and movies because this is not the DOAWK I grew up to lover. Also, at least the Long Haul was an actual movie.

Only thought there were a few funny parts, most notable sequence was Fregley's house. They cut out really important parts from the book, (including the saftey patrol), plus only 2 minutes of Rodrick? They also made Greg likeable, which is not something you should do. Go watch the live action, this is very boring and mostly unfunny.

Well...it's better than The Long Haul? Cause, you know...that's so hard to do...

I don't know, I guess it's possible I'm being blinded by my nostalgia for the original trilogy and I would have been happy if those original actors never aged and they could have kept adapting this whole book series, but I think it's equally possible that what I'm really being blinded by is this uuuuuuugly animation.

I don't know if I'd consider this series to be something that would work better in live action or not, but I do know that if you took the drawings of an 11 year old and transcribed them into a 3D setting, you'd get...well, this. And if you think about that concept while pretending this film never existed, does it sound like a good idea? Because this film does exist, and pretty clearly, it wasn't a good idea. Why couldn't it have just been animated in exactly the same way as the book's illustrations, just with some colour added? I can't imagine how much more appealing that would have looked.

Even if you can ignore the *shudder* character designs, the whole thing looks so cheap. Sometimes, on my university campus, they show the animation students' work on a big screen on one of the buildings. The animation students who obviously don't exactly have a huge budget, and this really doesn't look too far from what they can do. The models all look untextured, the lip-syncing is pretty bad, and it all feels so flat. Ironic that it being 2D would have worked so much better.

And I'm just now learning that this was Jeff Kinney's idea. Just like how he actually wrote the script for The Long Haul. Why do you hate your own creation, Jeff? Are you just sick of the whole thing? Am I lucky that I stopped reading the books around 2014, and if I continued, I would have been met with crap like this?

Because the animation certainly isn't the only thing wrong with this. The voice acting is dull and forgettable, it's not very well directed, the story is pretty boring, at least when it's presented like this, and I chuckled maybe...three times?

Granted, that's three times as much as The Long Haul, and I will at least applaud the fact that this film really did keep a laser focus on Greg and Rowley's friendship and is at least very short so I didn't suffer for too long, and I actually did quite like the changes they made to the Halloween sequence, but for all that...curse you entropy, why can't you just leave those original actors alone and let them make more of those films?

It occurred to me while watching this just how much that original cast really made those films as special as they are to me, because you take them out, and suddenly you have this. You take them out, and I'm not gonna like it.

Here are the main points I would like to make about this movie

Pros:

• This movie follows the book very well. Everything happens in the same order, which I find to be nice. I do think that this movie follows the storyline of the book better than the live action films.

• It is very nice to see Greg and his world in a fresh animation (manny is literally cursed.. the other characters are fine)

Cons:

• The voice acting throughout this movie isn't very "high-quality" Sometimes the characters' voices don't really capture the emotion as much as I would expect, and sometimes Susan Heffley sounds like her audio was recorded in a car..
• While the fresh animation style is nice, it seems unfinished. This movie seems to be experimental, like the animation isn't finished yet.

I've noticed Disney Plus is starting their new tradition that they're gonna start doing these kinds of films every year. And the 2021 Diary of a Wimpy Kid has given it to, well, quite a passible start. I'll be quite honest, I think I liked the live action film better than this one. But at least I obviously take this over The Long Haul any day. I do appreciate the effort of adapting to the book well, but the movie is too short for the story to show its first impression. The animation is okay, but it can be dated. The comedy can be fun to show a life in school like in the books, but it can end up a hit and miss. And the characters could've gotten the best than the live action films, but they feel off with Greg being stubborn to his own friend. I do get the same thing with the first live action film, but worse in this one. I know there will be Diary of a Wimpy Kid fans that grew up with the books and the live action films that would desire to watch a movie like this every year, starting with this one. So they probably have a good time with this one. However considering this is a short movie, I would recommend to treat this more like a special. It may not be the big zoo wee mama moment, but at least Disney Plus made a decent first impression with making more Diary of a Wimpy Kid movies.