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.
