Wonder Park (2019) - A Kind of Generic and Dull Movie

 

Hey, didn't you already review this movie? Technically, I haven't, that was a First Impressions blog. Okay, truth be told, it's been four years since my initial first impressions on this movie, and time has been... well, I don't want to exaggerate, but saying "Time hasn't been kind to this movie" is an understatement. Especially since time has been unfriendly to this movie before it even released. It went through Development Hell, was critically panned, just barely made back it's budget at the box office, which means it's pretty much a flop, and nobody even really remembers this movie. To be fair, it does seem like most of the bad movies from 2019 have been forgotten, unless there is a special place in your heart for Arctic Dogs, UglyDolls and The Secret Life of Pets 2. Everything was against this movie... except for me. I didn't like this movie, but I did have some respect for it, this was the first movie I gave a First Impressions look at, and all this time later, does it still have any respect from me?

The story follows June Bailey, an imaginative young girl who loves to build an imaginary theme park with her mother. Unfortunately, her mother gets the very serious "Never-explained" disease and has to leave, and I am wording it like that for reasons. This causes June to develop some emotional issues, which her father thinks sending her to math camp will help. However, while trying to get back, she stumbled upon a magical gateway to Wonder Park... Oh wait I'm sorry, Wonder Land, yeah, this movie's title totally wasn't a last minute name change in the slightest. Anyway, she finds the park is destroyed and overrun by possessed plush toys that feed broken pieces of the park to this entity called "The Darkness", sadly not a 2000s hair metal pastiche, but just a big purple cloud. This movie is a touch more generic than I remember it being. In my first impressions, I did say that this movie's plot was predictable and followed the formula, you can kind of tell where this story is going, except for the reveal that June's mother isn't dead, which is... a choice. This movie definitely has the stench of "We don't exactly know what we're doing", is this a story like Inside Out or Where the Wild Things Are?

A big part of the story for this movie is meant to be June taking her Mother's illness hard, which causes her to develop some mental issues, and I think it's meant to be mirrored by Peanut, who she meets sorting candies by colour. The thing is, we didn't see June sorting things by colour, and we didn't see Peanut aggressively vacuuming. I am going to, really word myself carefully here, I know OCD isn't just sorting everything by colour and keeping a cleaner than clean house, I know OCD is a lot of other things, but if you're going to connect these characters, you should at least have them doing the same thing. Have Peanut aggressively cleaning his area, polishing glass and sweeping up behind June as she walks around. Have what Peanut does mirror was June was doing.

I guess I should talk about the characters, but they're all pretty basic, don't really stand out too much, and just barely serve their purpose in the movie. Honestly, you can say similar things about the animation, it's bright and colourful, but nothing is really amazing, it's kind of like a basic plate of rice or pasta that's shaped like a circus tent, it looks nice, and as a meal it does its job, but it isn't really something that wows and amazes anybody. Character designs are pretty basic, not unappealing, but I feel I could see these designs in any other animated movie, and the montage songs are bland and forgettable. I can see why very few people have talked about this movie since 2019, there really isn't anything that spectacular about it. It does the basic job, and that's about it.

I do remember saying that I might have enjoyed this movie when I was a kid, because it would have triggered my imagination and make me think about what kind of fantastical and magical theme park I would build. Not an impression that holds up over time, not after playing the enormous waste of potential that is Disneyland Adventures and wanting to build my own virtual Disney park. I can imagine really little kids having their creativity sparked by this movie, but I'd probably give them Rollercoaster Tycoon 2 and download the OpenRCT2 mod and let them go crazy instead. I compared it to The Greatest Showman, another movie that gave me a creative bug, making me plan my own circus, and might have been a big inspiration to a personal project I've had on the back burner for a while now. The difference is, The Greatest Showman had some really good songs and choreography, and was a movie I would actually want to come back to. Wonder Park is mostly just a bore.

Yeah, my First Impressions do not hold up to snuff. I can't say I agree with everyone, I don't think this is one of the worst animated movies I've seen, but then again, generic and boring movies don't really rate highly for me. Nothing about this movie is really worth hating, save for the ending where they decide to chicken out and have the mother live, giving this movie the perfect ending. Yes kids, your sick parents will get through just fine, and my grandmother will come back from her fatal run-in with pneumonia. I know, sometimes things turn out just fine, but things never turn out perfect, and I do think that this movie is trying to portray a perfect ending. Is it harmful to kids? I'm not going to say yes, but I think it can give them the wrong idea, but really, if this is the only thing that gets me upset about a movie, the movie is pretty boring. I'm dropping my rating from a Slight Recommendation to a Not Recommended.

First Impressions: Luck (2022)

 

Plenty of movies get released directly to streaming services. I'm behind on a few myself, "The Sea Beast" from Netflix, "Beavis and Butt-Head Do The Universe" on Paramount+, and a Marmaduke movie... also on Netflix. These movies don't usually get a lot of attention, but as of now it has kind of been blowing up. I think in part due to the pandemic, more people are willing to wait for a movie to come to streaming than watch it in theatres, so a movie that skips theatres directly will probably get more attention now than before, even if it isn't a big release. Which is another thing to consider, Turning Red and Chip 'n Dale were released straight to Disney+, Netflix recently released a Rise of the TMNT movie, (Which No I am not going to talk about on here) and AppleTV+ recently released John Lasseter's first production outside of Pixar, Luck.

John Lasseter has been in some controversy recently, with allegations about indecent behavior towards female staff, the allegations don't seem as bad as John K's but they are still pretty bad, causing him to step down (or be fired I can't remember which) from Pixar in 2018. However, Skydance Media picked him up, and allowed him to be a producer on, what I believe to be their first animated production. Now let me be clear, this is all John Lasseter is on this production, a producer, and not even the only one. The director of this movie is Peggy Holmes who directed The Littler Mermaid: Ariel's Beginning and a couple Tinkerbell movies before this and has a large amount of Choreography credits for both animated and live-action movies. It's just that Lasseter is a bigger, and more controversial, name so that is going to be the name most associated with this movie.

I'm starting to worry that The Ice Age Adventures of Buck Wilde was less a one off and more of an omen of sorts, because so many of these movies I would rather talk about this things going on around them rather than the movie themselves. Yep, Luck is another entry in the "Fantastically boring" category, one thing I will say is that I am absolutely infuriated by the plot. Here's a question, why is it whenever a human, or mortal or whatever, enters some weird fantastical world, they are always never meant to be there? Yes, we had Oz and Narnia but those stories are old, The Wizard of Oz was first published in 1900 and the first Narnia book was in 1950, in most other stories it's always the human needs to be hidden, needs to keep a low profile, why? Here is this amazing fantastical world and we got to creep around it for some dumb reason. Let's get a fantastical world that a human accidentally falls into and isn't told to keep hidden and creep around.

On top of that, most of the movie is watching this character endure through her bad luck, and I guess it's meant to be inspiring, like she can overcome this and learn from it, but I just found it a little annoying to sit through. Good characters going through awful scenarios can work in some cases, SpongeBob being targeted by a bully isn't funny because he's getting targeted by a bully, it's funny because of his reactions to everything around him, and the reactions to him. When someone like Donald Duck or Harold Green gets in a bad spot, you can't feel bad for them because they usually brought it on themselves, Sam, the lead character in this movie, isn't reacting to her scenarios in an out there way, and she isn't bringing these situations onto herself, and the bad luck isn't fantastical either, in many ways it's actually depressing. She was at an adoption center until she aged out. I guess this builds sympathy, but you need more than sympathy in a character.

As for everything else, I mean the animation is nice, but it looks absolutely unspectacular, you know how Pixar movies and Disney movies and DreamWorks movies all have amazingly vibrant colours and lighting? Luck doesn't really have any of that, it looks like an Illumination production, it looks like it's just here to get a job done and nothing more. The Land of Luck, I was expecting a very lush environment with a lot of greens and golds and coppers, but instead there was a lot of white and it looked very, corporate futuristic. It's not an unappealing movie to watch, but it's not one of the prettiest movies ever, it's better than Buck Wilde or Paws of Fury, but it's no Bob's Burgers or Bad Guys.

I don't honestly know what anyone was expecting here, I think this movie only got notoriety because of the association with John Lasseter, maybe someone was expecting this to be what "The Visit" was to M. Night Shyamalan, or "Hardwired... to Self-Destruct" was for Metallica, the one project that pulled them out of their doldrums, and if not saved, at least improved their reputation. Unfortunately, if this project is anything for Lasseter, it's more akin to John K's Cans Without Labels or Keiji Inafune's Mighty No. 9, the project that only proved to be the final nail in the coffin of their reputations. The sad thing is, those projects were actually better nails than this one, because Lasseter wasn't majorly involved in this movie, again he was a producer and not the only one. This project really makes me akin John Lasseter not to John K, but more to Butch Hartman. Everyone associates him with a few major pieces and then he attached his name to something, all the ego slips through. Butch Hartman created your childhood, John Lasseter was the greatest creative force at Pixar, and yet one went on to scam people with Oaxis, the other had a minor part and major credit in bringing the world yet another generically bad animated movie. Even if you are going to handwave away the allegations, this movie is not worth it.