WesternAnimation Gloriously, unashamedly silly
This is a fun movie. It doesn't really try to be anything other than light-hearted silliness with an uplifting moral, and in that it succeeds quite well. The film takes us on a rollercoaster ride of bright colours, quirky characters, wild actions, and all-round wholesome insanity.
Voice acting is quite good. Animation is well-designed, though looks pretty average in motion.
There is a plot in there concerning a villain trying to change history and an evil hat, but that's largely secondary to a long stream of rapid-fire gags. It's not by any means a deep or complex movie, and it probably won't be remembered after about 10 years, but it's still a good watch.
If you like this, you might also like:
- Monty Python And The Holy Grail - the gags come at a similar pace, and there's a similar ratio of story to humour, but in this case, the humour is rather British.
- The Melancholy Of Haruhi Suzumiya - a similar style of humour coming through a Japanese lens, though aimed at an older audience.
WesternAnimation Gloriously, unashamedly silly
This is a fun movie. It doesn't really try to be anything other than light-hearted silliness with an uplifting moral, and in that it succeeds quite well. The film takes us on a rollercoaster ride of bright colours, quirky characters, wild actions, and all-round wholesome insanity.
Voice acting is quite good. Animation is well-designed, though looks pretty average in motion.
There is a plot in there concerning a villain trying to change history and an evil hat, but that's largely secondary to a long stream of rapid-fire gags. It's not by any means a deep or complex movie, and it probably won't be remembered after about 10 years, but it's still a good watch.
If you like this, you might also like:
- Monty Python And The Holy Grail - the gags come at a similar pace, and there's a similar ratio of story to humour, but in this case, the humour is rather British.
- The Melancholy Of Haruhi Suzumiya - a similar style of humour coming through a Japanese lens, though aimed at an older audience.
WesternAnimation Middle Disney
A fun movie. It revels in the fantastic, and it feels like whoever made it did their best to have fun, so we like it, too.
It's not as bad as 'New Disney', as I like to call it. I was surprised at how much heart it has for a Disney movie that wasn't hand-drawn. It's nothing short of heartwarming.
That said, it's not 'Old Disney' either. It's somewhere in the middle. A giant chunk of the movie is comprised of silly, lighthearted gags, and there are so many parts that reek of being there for marketing purposes I lost count. And it tries to become a serious movie in direct contradiction of this. It's a serious Mood Whiplash, going from one side of the silly/serious scale to the other and staying there for the rest of the movie within ten minutes. You'll have to deal with that, sorry, but if you can forget about the prior silliness when it's serious, you'll be fine.
Also, these people do not understand time travel. It's bunk all the way through. Not even the rules of fun and cool can prevent the mechanics from getting under your skin, and to watch this you'll have to accept that and ignore the premise.
The ending seems rather rushed, like they made this carefully-crafted movie and said 'oh, jeez, we need to make the connection to the future in ten minutes'. And it'll melt your heart into a puddle anyway. I'm serious here, it's absolutely adorable.
If you're going to watch it and you don't figure everything out until it's told to you, watch it again. Not just a recommendation, a necessity. It becomes five times better because it all makes sense.
Also, Wilbur alone justifies watching this movie.
WesternAnimation Keep Moving Forward
I might be starting to sound like a broken record at this point but “this movie is underrated”.
First of all, as I mentioned in my review of The Prince of Egypt, I don’t actually have a problem with mood whiplash. I think that it enables an excellent blend of comedy and drama, like that offered by Avatar. Of course, this movie is nowhere near as good as those, I’m just responding to a critique of it.
Also, I’ve seen this movie criticized for having a contrived ending which it does but to be fair it’s a time travel movie. I don’t think that Back to the Future ,Avengers: Endgame ,Alice Through the Looking Glass , X-Men Days of Future Past or The End of Eternity were any less contrived but I didn’t actually complain about any of those. I think that’s an almost inevitable pitfall of the time travel genre. So I’m cool with it.
The comedy of this film is absolutely hilarious. I find the running gag with Yagoobian not thinking things through extremely entertaining. And Wilbur’s efforts to conceal Lewis’s true identity from the Robinsons was something I found funny. And how Poke the Poodle the ineffectual sympathetic villain is is also entertaining.
Speaking of whom, I find the comically incompetent villain to be unintentionally sympathetic despite his being an obviously unreliable narrator and I like him well enough. And I think Doris is an extremely impressive villain.
I like the Aesop of keep moving forward and the Aesop of accepting the ones who chose to adopt him as his family despite them not being his biological family.
Is this film an animated classic? Not even close. But is it a great movie? You bet it is.