Duck Duck Goose (2018) - An unpleasant, unfunny and unlikable movie

2018 was not a bad year for animated movies. Yes, we got two of the lousiest Batman movies, a sequel nobody wanted to a movie nobody wanted and Smallfoot, but it also gave us Isle of Dogs, Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, Incredibles 2 and Mirai of the Future. It's tempting to say 2018 is one of the better years for animation of the 2010s in general. However, with everything good, of course there was some pretty bad stuff, and though Sherlock Gnomes was pretty bad, this was the worst animated movie of 2018.

After he gets separated from his flock, Peng has to head to the hot springs before winter arrives. What keeps him from getting there are a broken wing and two little ducklings being hunted by psychotic, split personality cat. That's pretty much the whole plot, and as expected it's as bare bones as it sounds. Most of the opening is filler of Peng flying around which, I guess is supposed to look impressive, but all I could think of when I was watching was how much time was wasted on animated these scenes. The movie is mostly a road-trip movie, it goes from one locale to the next, stopping for a joke or a character moment.

Peng is your standard unlikable protagonist, egotistical, full of himself and with a disregard for the authority of others. He's the kind of protagonist that literally starts his journey wanting to get some young children to tag along on his journey so they can get eaten. The duckling Chi is your typical child character that thinks she has to take on a more mature role, and tries to play off her young age as "Not that young". Her brother, Chao is your token big eating doofus with a heart, and that's all he is. Those are the main characters and they are all characters I don't want to spend the movie with. We've seen characters like Peng before, only this one tries to get children eaten. We've seen characters like Chi and Chao before, and done better too. The side characters are also annoying or unlikable, like the birds that mock Peng for having a broken wing and make fun of the fact that he might get eaten or freeze to death. The hippie squirrel that is annoying, and the head goose that literally tries to tell his daughter Peng is dead, and I think tries to mate with her... Yeah that scene was weird.

The villain is bland. He has the whole Smegol and Gollum thing, but unlike Gollum, he's not an interesting character. The best I can really say is that he is the best character in the movie, which is not really high praise.

As a comedy, the humour falls flat on it's tail. Toilet humour is abundant in this movie, because "it be a movie for kids and kids like toilet humour". When I first saw this movie, the only joke that made me crack an actual smile, was an erection joke. Which I would assume was for the two or three parents who were actually being parents and watching this movie with their kids. The humour never really reaches past the idea of "farting is funny" and there really is no clever writing or witty dialogue, making this one of those movies that only has "adult" humour to warrant a PG rating.

The animation of this movie is okay, only when things are moving quickly does it look weird, but the animation is fluid and colourful, characters look how they're supposed to, and there aren't any animation errors, at least none that I could see. Though the animation is fine it's not a great looking film. There are moments that are supposed to look nice, but all I could think of while watching them was how much better they would look with a studio like Disney, or DreamWorks behind it, though they might have made a better movie entirely.

Duck Duck Goose contains very little content for anyone over the age of five, and even then that's being generous. I find that a good kid's movie has things for everyone, good characters, good humour, engaging stories, these are things that the best kids movies have. The worst always pander to the kids in the audience, and they always end up with movies that people look back on and wonder what was wrong with their tastes as a kid. Nothing was wrong, that's how these movies work, they entertain you as a kid and when you have your own kids, you show it to them. Kids deserve better movies than Duck Duck Goose.

It's 2019 as of the writing of this review, and there are literally hundreds of amazing animated movies out there, plenty of them are rated G and PG. Movies with beautiful artistry, engaging story and characters, and are timeless, kids from today can always enjoy movies like The Land Before Time or Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron, and those movies have aspects that older viewers can enjoy. Duck Duck Goose does not have any qualities of those movies, it's just a movie that was made to distract children while their parents do something else. This is a movie I think people should avoid, there are so much better things to watch, and for children to watch.

Hercules and Xena - The Animated Movie: The Battle for Mount Olympus (1998) - A Dated Mess in All the Wrong Ways

Anybody remember those cheesy live-action shows about Hercules and Xena from the 1990s? They had Kevin Sorbo and Lucy Lawless as the lead roles and all the stuff? Well, those shows were a bit before my time, so I don't have any memory of them, I don't even know if they were cheesy, I just kind of assume they are because, you know 90s action show pre-Game of Thrones, TV budget and what not. Well, in 1998 (my VHS says 1997 but all other sources say 1998), there was a direct to video animated feature starring both of the legendary warriors, and quite frankly, one would have to be told it was from the 1990s.

After Zeus takes Hercules' mother to Mount Olympus, Hera, in a fit of rage, decides to summon the four titans to dethrone Zeus and the other gods. Hercules and Xena must get to Mount Olympus, defeat the titans and save the world. The plot is simple, and they try to give more to it by adding in subplots like Xena's friend being turned into a giant eagle, or Hercules thinking Zeus kidnapped his mother. Wile saying these subplots go nowhere would be wrong as they both play big parts in the story, the only thing they really lead up to is a boring song part way towards the climax. However, simple plots are fine in any movie, as if you boil down any movie to the bare basics you get a simple plot, what really drives a good story are the characters.

While I don't know a lot about the shows that Hercules and Xena originated from, most of the characters in this movie are bland and cookie cutter. Zeus is Zeus, imagine any incarnation of Zeus and that's basically what you have. They try to give him some humanity, but I'm fairly sure that there are other incarnations that do this better. Xena's friend Gabrielle has little character, spending most of the movie as a giant eagle, and Hercules' friend Iolaus, is kind of annoying. None of these characters were really interesting enough to want to follow them on their journey, even when they were in battle, I was mostly browsing Tumblr waiting for something else to happen.

As for the gods and titans, they're about as cookie cutter as a Wal-Mart baking isle. Of the massive pantheon of Greek gods, they went with five gods total, Zeus, Hera, Artemis, Aphrodite and Ares. The only one to get any real character is Aphrodite and they give her a hippie, surfer, spirtualist character that is kind of annoying. The titans are generic rough and tough bad guys and Hera is a generic villain, right down to her evil plan being to take over the world. Quite frankly, Kid Icarus Uprising couldn't come fast enough.

As alluded to prior, this is a musical, and of the musicals I have scene, this one is one of the worst. There are three songs in this movie, and the only one that was palatable was the opening song, but that doesn't mean it was good. The titan's song is generic and repetitive and Xena's song (Because of course the main female character has a song) is a slow, boring and bland ballad. There's no real "Hakuna Matata" or "Goofy Goober Rock" or even a "You're a Mean One, Mr. Grinch" in the movie, no musical piece that really stands out. Even the background music is kinda generic in this movie, half the time I didn't even notice there was any background music.

But none of that is what makes this movie dated, well it is, but this movie straight up looks dated. The animation and art-style look straight out of the 1960s. I knew that direct to video movies were cheap, and I've seen some really cheap looking movies, but this is the worst of them. Golden Films at least look like they belong in the 1990s, Disney's direct to video movies look better. I have never seen this kind of problem before, this movie was a 1990s production, and it pulls all the same cost-saving corner cutting that cartoons in the 60s and 70s did.

Backgrounds are two solid colours, character movement is stilted, I don't even think I've ever seen a character move and talk at the same time. Lips won't move when they can get away with it, and some movements are way too fast. It's kind of a movie you have to see to believe, especially when it comes to the facial animations. Seriously, the movie's facial animations are terrible, and hilariously awful. Character's often have goofy and exaggerated expressions and some of these faces are quite frankly meme worthy. Seriously, if you're a meme creator, I recommend this movie just so you can get stills of the characters' faces.

Other than that though, the movie is a mess. Bland characters, a simple story, generic music and some seriously dated animation that make this movie look older than it actually is. It's not even an interestingly bad movie, as a lot of the movie is forgettable and boring. If it was actually a worse movie, I might actually slightly recommend it, but it's not even so bad it's good, it's just a bland, out-dated mess of a movie that is not worth remembering, let alone watching.

Robinson Crusoe (AKA The Wild Life) (2016) - An Unfunny, Uninteresting and Ugly Movie

I wanted to review a different movie this week, but since I've been clearing out my room, I've packed it away for the time being. So I decided to look at one of the movies I randomly found in a Walmart bargain bin to see if it was worth the eight dollars it was priced at.

The cover may say that the title is The Wild Life, and that is correct, but only in North America, in other regions it was released as Robinson Crusoe. It is a Belgian-French production released in 2016, and is, as the title would suggest, based on the Robinson Crusoe story by Daniel Defoe, though I'm gonna have to assume loosely. I've never read the original text, or seen any of the other adaptations. I went into the movie completely blind and what I got was a boring wreck that would have left me stranded.

When Robinson Crusoe gets shipwrecked on the shores of a mysterious island, he comes across many animals that are, at first, afraid of him, but as time goes on Crusoe and the animals end up becoming good friends and build a tree house and a watchtower. All the while a group of evil cats are plotting to remove Crusoe from the island and kill the other animals. Did that plot sound exciting? No? Well now you know problem number one with the movie.

The plot is bare bones. They try to flesh it out by having another character be apprehensive and skeptical towards Crusoe, but all this amounts to having her fly off and be chased by the cats. There is a scene where she sabotages the watchtower by blowing out the candles, but it leads to nothing, there is no great character turn around, no moment of realization that she was in the wrong, nothing. What we get instead, is plenty of scenes that contain nothing but movement, I believe internet critics have dubbed this kind of scene "Movement porn".

As for the characters, there really isn't any. Crusoe is just kind of the likable doofus, Tuesday the parrot is optimistic and get this, wants more than his boring life, where have I heard that before? The cats are just your generic evil villains, they start off being manipulative and cunning, but they end up being bloody-thirsty savages by the end of the movie. The rest of the cast is kind of one-note, the goat's entire character is that he's old, the tapir's entire character is that she's fat, the pangolin and echidna characters have none. The only other character to be slightly more fleshed out would the female bird Kiki, as she is the one who is skeptical of Crusoe for most of the movie. Again though, she has no real arc, no turn around, it goes from one minute she can't trust Crusoe or the ground he walks on, and then the next minute she's concerned for his well being. The characters leave a lot to be desired in this movie and offer nothing.

Humour wise, this movie fails. Most of the humour is slapstick and it doesn't stick. Characters don't really react to their hits and falls. In one moment, Crusoe could get hit by a board, and his only reaction would be an "Oof" or an "Ah", and not even the animals get any really funny reactions out of being hit or falling down, and the characters get beaten around a lot in this movie. As for other types of humour, there really isn't any. There is no clever wordplay or wisecracks made, characters don't really comment on anything really absurd and the only other joke we really get is the Tapir waving it's butt at the camera.

The only saving grace this movie has is the animation, but even then not by much. The movie looks bright and colourful, and kind of ugly as well. Well nothing is technically wrong with the animation, I found it to be unpleasant to look at for very long. The cat's looked ugly, ragged and scrawny, they looked worse than the early Computer Animated cat from the 1960s. The settings looked okay, but for 2016, it could have been better. While nothing is technically wrong with the animation, it left a lot to be desired.

Really though, that is the best way to summarize this movie, it left a lot to be desired. It's hard to get mad at the movie for the crime of being boring, but even then in the case of "It could've been better", movies like The Stolen Princess are worse in that regard. There are movies that are really bad and movies that are really insulting, The Wild Life is just boring and unfunny. It's hard to be angry at this movie as it doesn't do anything offensive or exceedingly bad, but at the same time it's hard to really care for this movie. It offers nothing outside of being background noise for parents who want to let the TV babysit their kids, in that respect I do kinda hate this movie, but unlike trash like Duck Duck Goose or any Video Brinquedo or Wow Now Entertainment knock-offs, it's mostly harmless. If you see it in a bargain bin for cheap, and I mean very cheap, it might distract your kids once or twice, but even then I'd say skip it.