The Wild is a very poor effort. I don’t recommend it for children or adults. I also want to warn you that this review will be a bit different. Usually my reviews involve a look at the plot, a look what’s good, a look at what’s bad and then some current events and such. That must change given how nasty this one was. You’ll still get what ‘s good, I owe you that, and you’ll get some of the plot because I know you are hella interested but as for what’s bad… well, let’s just say you’ll be getting plenty of that because that’s what I got when I watched the 85 minutes.
I liked Eddie Izzard as the Koala Bear big time. The five minutes worth of jokes he has are the only mildly amusing moments in the entire flick. I also like Janeane Garofalo’s voice because it’s sultry and has a nice timbre to it. She plays a giraffe (more on that later).
The plot of The Wild (animated feature) is of a boy lion trying to find his roar. He lives in a zoo with his dad Sampson and some lovable scamp types. The kid lion can’t roar like big dad and so he tries to escape to “the wild” so he can be as lionly as dad. He rolls out and then all the other animated characters have to go and find him/save him and such.
You may want to see it based on all that coolness – if so, more power to ya. BUT, if you think you might skip this one and need some levity just read on for my specific problems with the film. This is a whole new style of review to combat a whole new level of badness. Here are my specific areas of concern:
The animals all speak English: This is not a huge issue because it’s consistent with most animation but coupled with the next point it makes me mad.
The animals from other countries (like Africa) speak English too: Look, once I get past the animals talking, and speaking American, then I’m supposed to buy some type of universal animal language like Esperanto that just happens to be English? C’mon, give me subtitles or something. Let’s go art house with animation!
The animals break dance: They never show them watching TV so I’m not sure how they would have picked this skill up, even with their speaking efforts. They also seem to be tremendous dancers in general, complete with choreography, which makes me suspect. Certainly there must be animals in the kingdom that don’t have natural rhythm right?
The animals drive a boat: Without opposable thumbs I don’t buy it. Again, this is the director stretching the bounds of credulity. His nickname, for the record, is “spaz.”
The big lion (Sampson) has a roar that creates wind: I’ve been to the zoo and have seen lions. They growl, roar, whatever but it doesn’t create wind. It would require lungs the size of jet engines to do so.
The animals are all friends: The squirrel is in love with the giraffe, the koala loves the lion and so on. This doesn’t gibe with anything I learned about animals growing up. If you want to make everything buddy buddy why not just make them people, and say it’s some type of future world where people are captives in zoos? Speaking of humans…
There aren’t any humans in New York City in the middle of the night when the animals roll through en masse: When I was in NYC there were people everywhere no matter what time of night it was. I couldn’t walk four yards without tripping over a hobo. I don’t buy a lion in the middle of the night not getting noticed.
A Coldplay song comes on and the animals seem to enjoy it: No way any living thing jams out to Coldplay.
The group drives a tugboat across the Atlantic ocean: Besides the obvious gas issues I can’t see a mid sized craft dealing with the sizable swells around Cape Horn. Why not set this film around Lake Michigan and throw us a bone?
One of the wildebeests has this odd plan to become a carnivore: Again, just a bit out of character.
The lion runs from poodles and other dogs: Even if the lion was scared, which okay, might happen, no way would a poodle get up enough courage to chase after him. A poodle who saw a scared lion would probably just count his blessings and keep on moving.
That’s all I got. Maybe I’m being too sensitive but as a reviewer I’m asked to immerse myself in a world and in this case the world was a big lie. That just won’t do. Next time maybe these guys should make a kid’s film and not have to deal with all these logic issues.
