When the climax of the film is a Guinness Record for The World's Largest (Strawberry) Milkshake, and it's a German musical, you might think it promises quirky fun. When you read that the little children are trying to rescue their grandparents from the old folks home because they are more fun than their robotic parents, you might be prepared to say "awwww" a few times. When you learn that it is about the honor of being guinea pigs bestowed upon a city deemed to be the quintessential ordinary town by The Institute of Consumer Research; that, blessing or curse, they are given various inventions to try out to see what will be successfully marketable in the outside world, you might believe it has the potential to be something amazing.
You would be correct.
Unfortunately, the creative and talented director Veit Helmet- that often takes stories that seem ridiculously still on paper and somehow turns then into magical stories on film that somehow work- missed a golden opportunity here. It turns out to be the opposite this time- a story that sounds so promising on paper turns into an unfunny and frankly irksome fiasco on film.
Creative sometimes, evokes a chuckle here and there, but amateurishly stupid the rest of the 80 minute runtime. Overall gratuitously weird. Still oddly compelling, in a rubbernecking, cannot-avert-my-eyes-from-this-catastrophe kind of way. And only intermittently.
But, given there is no book or readily accessible script to be read, if might be worth playing this out in the background to meet the eponymous coati- an endearing and playful mammal, brother to the much more widely known raccoon, and to see the fascinating ideas and inventions that must have been delightful for the props team!
