Movie Review: The Pebble and the Penguin (1995): There's a really good movie in here

Well... hiatus was fun, but I want to get back to what this blog was meant to be about, exploring the vast world of animation, experiencing the weird, wonderful and creative works that such a wonderful medium can bring us. When it comes to wonderful, there are very few names to make that word synonymous with animation as Don Bluth, a former Disney animator striking off on his own in the 80s, he made movies that not only rivalled Disney, but in many cases usurped Disney's throne. The Secret of NIMH and The Land Before Time are fantastic movies that define the medium and show that not all amazing animation has to come from Disney. So what happened in the 90s? In my review of Rock-A-Doodle, I posited the idea that the movies that Don Bluth wanted to make became more passe in the Disney Renaissance and someone pushed him to adapt to the changing landscape of the 90s, and what followed was some of his... more odd film making attempts. Case in point, The Pebble and the Penguin. Why does that line sound so familiar?

The Pebble and the Penguin follows Hubie, an Adélie Penguin who falls in love with a girl named Marina, and wishes to propose to her with a pebble, however he gets tossed aside by another penguin who has eyes for Marina, a big, hulking obviously designed to be the villain penguin named Drake. Hubie must travel across miles of ocean with a new friend, a Rockhopper Penguin named Rocko, to return to the island before Drake can marry Marina, or she gets banished by law. Overall, I'd say the story is... halfway solid. There is an idea here, and it does almost work. What is the biggest flaw? I guess it would be that it's a bit too formulaic, but it's not too bad in that regard. Obvious tropes like the "friends squabbling only to make up later" and the "Fake Out Death" are here, but for a kids movie, the plot isn't all that bad. I guess it could have probably benefited from fleshing out a few things, like for the most part we completely forget about Marina and Drake save for little snippets before the climax.

Maybe it would have been nice to spend more time with the characters, because they have some charm to them. Hubie is a shy but good-hearted guy, and it might just be that I am soft for this kind of character, but I can't hate him, plus he kicks a leopard seal in the face, that's pretty awesome. Marina is kind of bland, but to be fair, they do give a little moment to explain why she likes Hubie, I love it when the unrequited crush is not actually completely unrequited, and it's clear from the get-go that Marina does actually like Hubie. Really, the worst character in the movie is sadly the villain, Drake, who is just a bland and boring entitled jerk, like come on, I don't need uncomfortably buff Penguin version of Gaston. Sadly, it does not help that he is voiced by Tim Curry, and as much as I love Tim Curry, something about this performance didn't quite work, Tim Curry works as the slimy and sinister evil, not really the pompous and arrogant evil. He is more Maleficent brand evil and less Cruella brand.

This is not to say that the voice acting is subpar, for the most part there are some good talents here. Shani Wallis is the narrator and she does have that voice for it, Jim Belushi as Rocko is pretty good casting, and Annie Golden as Marina was actually really good. Plus, there are cameo appearances by names like Will Ryan, B. J. Ward, Pat Musick, Maggie Roswell, and Scott Bullock who is known for his role as Hades in Kid Icarus: Uprising. Really, it is just Martin Short and Tim Curry who I don't fully gel with, Martin Short as Hubie does feel like good casting, he does have a voice that fits the kind of pathetic but lovable character Hubie is, I guess I just can't separate him from B.E.N. from Treasure Planet, which would come out about seven years later.

Then we have the songs, and the songs are absolutely, complete, one-hundred and ten percent okay. They're fine. I'm probably not going to be humming them, except for the Good Ship Misery song, and Tim Curry's villain song is sadly one of the less good songs in the movie, though least good might go to Martin Short and Jim Belushi's duet. I might flip flop on which one is the worst. Really, the biggest problem is just that the songs are just kind of... there. They fill their purpose and do nothing beyond that. I could imagine a soundtrack by Alan Menkin or Elton John, but instead we got Barry Mannilow. Well, I can think of worse people to get for the music of this movie.

Then we have the animation, and if you want a drinking game that will leave you with a hangover that makes you wish alcohol was banned, take a shot every time you notice an animation error in this movie. I've caught a few, characters in the background being frozen, which also happens during song sequences where they should be singing along in, in some cases you might find unfinished animation, I even think Hubie's hat was coloured incorrectly once. That being said, when the animation is actually animated it is pretty good. Don Bluth is a fantastic animator, and while I don't think this is as good as his early stuff, honestly there are times I think it gets close, like within earshot of something like Secret of NIMH. Really, I get the feeling this movie was rushed for a deadline, and if it had more time to get ironed out, this could have been Don Bluth's best movie since the 1980s instead of his least bad movie of his flop era.

Really that is the biggest problem with The Pebble and the Penguin, instead of being his best movie in a while, it's his least bad movie of a bunch, and that is a darn shame. The movie just needed some more time to iron out the wrinkles, mostly in the script and animation. I get why people can be nostalgic about this movie, I see it, I see a really good movie in here, it's just a shame we didn't get that. I'd actually really like to see an early draft script for this movie because I really do wonder what this movie could have been. Imagine a remake with rewritten songs and more time to flesh out the characters but with the same, or similar traditional animation. Still, I should focus on what we have instead of what could have been, and what we have is alright, like I wouldn't mind showing this to kids, I know the endorsement of "There are worse movies" is not a very... high endorsement, but still, I can't see this movie causing any harm.

Tom Sawyer (2000) - Really bland, but mostly harmless

 

I have said before that there is a hierarchy to movie releases, that you have movies released in theatres, then major streaming releases, followed by minor streaming releases, then Direct-to-Video releases, Television movies and finally movies released onto YouTube. I suggest this hierarchy as like, levels of ignorable for critics and audiences really, not necessarily about quality or how respectable they are, lots of direct-to-video releases exist, and just by sheer volume some of them are going to be good. This is really how I observe the kinds of movies other critics talk about, that they tend to focus on movies that were given theatrical releases, or movies on streaming when they have a ton of buzz about them. I feel like I was one of the only critics who tried to watch the Larva Island Movie when it was released onto Netflix, but I know I'm not the only one who watched movies like Duck Duck Goose or Next Gen. It makes me wonder why some movies just don't get much attention, do we just have a stigma about smaller movie releases? So, I'm going to take this time to take a look at a smaller scale release, the 2000 direct-to-video Tom Sawyer movie by MGM.

The story is an adaptation of the classic Mark Twain novel. I only vaguely know of the book in the sense that it is a pop culture icon, so whether or not it is a good adaptation, I can't say. Tom Sawyer is a rambunctious young man who becomes smitten with a young girl named Becky. Also, he and his friend Huckleberry Finn are looking for buried treasure, while a criminal by name of Injurin' Joe (Nice save there guys), is also looking for said treasure, murdering a man and framing another in the process. It's mostly the scenes with Joe that I find the most interesting, because they get fairly dark and intense, but most of the first act is spent with Tom cooing over Becky, and chunks of the rest of the movie are spent with Tom's Aunt and brother, and his friends, and frankly, I just don't find any of them interesting characters. Even the scenes with Joe, they do go somewhat dark, showing him actually kill a man, but it's a tame killing (Ain't that an oxymoron), the man gets thrown into a gravestone and we don't get to see the impact, we don't even get a dark joke that he was thrown into the grave he was just mourning at. It's scenes like this that make me want to respect the movie, because it's clear they did want to tell a respectful version of the story, but the rest of it... eh.

I think a lot of that is down to the characters, because I just don't find them that interesting. Tom is Bart Simpson, he is rambunctious and trouble-making, but ultimately a decent kid beneath it all. Huckleberry Finn is sort of the idiot best friend character, Becky is the southern lady, but is also that "non-girl" girl, she's into arm wrestling and adventure, and I've seen every single one of these character types before. Honestly, Joe isn't even that interesting, he's just your standard snarling crook, and I swear any character like Tom's brother is immediately a character I will despise. I feel like a lot of this isn't really the movie's fault, Tom Sawyer was published in 1876, about one-hundred and thirteen years before The Simpsons aired their premier episode in 1989, but the trope is called "Seinfeld is unfunny" for a reason. I've seen these characters before, and this movie does not really do much different with these tropes. At least the voice acting was alright, but as much as I love Betty White and Kevin Michael Richardson, these weren't the best roles for them.

Frankly, the animation is not much better. Full disclosure, I found an uploaded version of this movie on YouTube, so the visual quality was not gonna be the highest, pro tip for anyone getting into media review, ease of access and quality tend not to go hand in hand. Regardless, the animation was... okay. Frankly, there is not a lot to comment about it, the animation is serviceable, it's... it's mid, the animation is mid. The whole movie is completely, absolutely, agonizingly mid! The characters? Mid! The story? Mid! The animation? Mid! They should have called this movie "Mid Sawyer", it's so mid I wouldn't be shocked if this was actually Illumination's first feature, everything about it is mid. The music especially, I skipped through a lot of the songs, but the opening song was repetitive, and it cut out for a brief moment to some Arabian Music, because it was for a dream sequence and that is what Tom was dreaming at the moment, I hated it when it happened in the Pink Elephants song in Dumbo, I hate it now. I'm not even really a big country music fan, actually no, I'm not a big fan of post fifties country music from male singers, and the main characters are voiced by country stars. This review was really tough to write, because what can I say about a movie that is absolutely mid?

Okay, well there is one thing I can really talk about; Is this movie a good introduction to the classic Americana story? To answer this question, I have to ask myself if I would have liked this movie as a kid, and I have to say... maybe? I can easily imagine myself fast forwarding through several of the scenes to get to parts that would have interested me a lot more. I can't say it's made me more interested in the book, but it hasn't made me any less interested either. It's harmless, just really bland. If this is something you think your kid might be into, it's better than crap like Duck Duck Goose, but as for watching it on your own, meh, I don't think I can really recommend it all that much. At the same time though, it's not really a movie I recommend avoiding on any level, it's just a movie that I feel only really gets watched by people babysitting kids. So, I don't recommend it, but if it's available to watch somewhere, I can think of worse movies. I can also think of much more interesting ones, and frankly, I need something much more interesting to review next.

First Impressions: The Addams Family (2019)

Animated Antic said that this was the biggest disappointment of the year for him.

Anim8Ball titled his review of the movie "Me-Di-O-Cre *snap* *snap*"

Now, I'm sure they both have valid arguments and criticisms towards the movie, but going in, with reasonable expectations and a lack of experience with the Addams Family, I can personally say that I disagree with them.

I thought the movie was pretty good, not great, but pretty good.

I kind of enjoyed the main arcs for each character, and the themes of tradition and fitting in the plots have. Now, I am not saying they are really deep or nuanced, what I'm saying is I enjoyed them. I really liked the film showing that Wednesday and Parker weren't all that different, and that Morticia was just as restrictive and controlling as Parker's mother. Of course, the difference between the two is still obvious, one goes to an extreme of keeping her daughter from leaving the house, and realizes she's done wrong. The other goes to the extreme of trying to straight up murder the entire family, and thinks she is justified, like I said, there really is not a lot of nuance here, so I don't think this movie will win any awards for plot.

That being said, I can take a lousy plot if the characters and jokes are good, so how are the jokes? They're mixed. A lot of the jokes are not really funny, but the ones I did find funny, I really found funny. The science class scene for an example, while the Frankenstein reference is cute, albeit a little predictable, the following reference to Invasion of the Body Snatchers, I found hilarious, though I like reference humour. I think the humour as a whole was mixed, I found it funnier than some, but some of the jokes were pretty lame.

As for character, I think Wednesday was a really strong character, the way she works off of the others was always entertaining. I don't think there was a character I didn't enjoy in some way. On top of that, I really like the designs of them. The villain being this "standard" of beauty contrasts very well with Morticia Addams being very slender and monotone. Honestly, I quite enjoyed the characters in this movie, especially Wednesday, no wonder everyone likes her.

Maybe I'm more forgiving of this movie than others, I have not really indulged myself in The Addams Family outside of internet memes, so maybe there is something else I am missing. However, I did enjoy my time, and you know what, this movie was not The Secret Life of Pets 2, so, that is something. Does it have it's flaws, yes. However, I did enjoy my time, and I do think some others will too, so with that, I can safely give this movie a Slight Recommendation.