JanArso

The entire Movie is a straight up insult to the viewers willing suspension of disbelief and to make it through you have to willingly suspend any and all function of your brain.

One really has to ask the question how little anyone responsible for this cared about the general concept of Filmmaking as a whole, to think it was a good Idea, to take an extremely one-dimensional comic-relief-character from a Teenie-Franchise about a dysfunctional school and send her on an epic quest through a fantasy world with castles and dragons.

All of this wouldn't even be half as offensive if the entire point of the character in question wasn't to point fingers and make fun of the lower class population, instead of asking the question what the issue with trapping and abandoning people in poverty could be, which should've been outdated even when the first movie of the franchise hit the cinema in 2013.

German Film Funding will put money into anything that is backed by an already successful franchise (by domestic standards anyways) and you basically get free tax-payer money to fund absolute dumpster fires like these, keeping an entire film-crew busy that could've worked on something more meaningful in the meantime. But if you're a young, talented writer, who thinks outside the box and has ideas for something fresh, new or dare I say experimental even, good luck pitching any ideas to the officials responsible. So much talent going to waste in this broken industry.

It's as if the Middle-Finger in the Movie's Poster was meant literally, insulting not only the viewer for watching this crap but also the entire-german movie industry, saying:"Look what we can get away with while you will never get to realize your dreams.". Poetry.

To get this out of the way first: it's pretty obvious that this Movie was Disney's attempt at cashing in on the "Madagascar"-Hype of 2005/2006. A group of snarky, spoiled Animals led by a lion escape the Central Park Zoo in New York City and accidentally go to Africa. Definitely not a coincidence considering it came out not even half a year after said Dreamworks Movie. To be fair, Dreamworks often enough tried ripping off the basic concepts of Disney (Pixar) Movies too ("Shark Tale" & "Antz" come to mind), so I guess you can't be too mad about this, even though it is quite shameless.

What bothers me more is that this Movie just feels empty most of the time, especially considering it's Art-Direction, or dare say the lack thereof.

All the characters have this weird style that tries to look somewhat realistic but in a cartoony way. It's halfway there on both sides but not quite, which leads to the quite uncomfortable situation that none of the characters have features conveying anything about their character/ making them look memorable. If you had two characters being the same animal you couldn't tell them apart and if you hypothetically tried to sell them as plushed toys for merchandise, nobody would be able to tell they're from the movie because they're THAT generic looking.

Generic-Looking is a good description that could also be aplied to the movie's locations. When you're making a movie about animals going to a "wild nature paradise" you should at least put in the effort to make the backgrounds look a little more impressive. There is a scene where the Lion is looking for his son, stopping on the edge of a cliff to scream his name while the camera zooms out to show the viewer the supposed beauty of africa and it really falls flat because of how underwhealmingly uninteresting it is looking. The bauty of animation is, that you can create stunningly beautiful dream-worlds for your scenes to be set it, this movie's backgrounds however more often than not feel like the characters are standing in front of a Windows XP wallpaper or like someone dumped a few rocks and plants into a very small studio to simulate a jungle. They somehow even managed to make New York City feel empty. There is a drive-montage in the beginning of the Movie and throughout it's entirety the streets are awkwardly empty. I am not kidding, there is not a single person or driving car in sight, it's almost creepy. (Nevermind the cheeky Ad for a now out of business Toy-Retailer they managed to cramp in here)

Now many people will probably shrug the Movie's art-direction off by saying that it looked fine for 2006-Standards, but I would like to remind you that this came out 3/4 of a year after Madagascar which, from an art-direction perspective looked a lot better. (And that Movie isn't perfect either).

The weird part is that the Movie has a pretty dynamcially animated opening-sequence, with a pretty unique art-direction. You really have to wonder why they didn't stick to something like that. If anything the opening sequence and it's transition to the style of the rest of the movie made it's bad art-direction even more noticable.

Storywise: Well... It is what it is. Nothing that will blow your mind and give you a new perspective on life. Pretty predictable overall but not anywhere near as bad as the art-direction.

Overall it's remarkable how unremarkable this Movie is and I will probably have forgotten I even watched it in a year or so. It's almost "Mockbuster"-stuff though it is too unremarkable to be "so bad it's good". It's just boring.

Feel free to ignore this movie.