My uncle's Netflix account takes us to the family features category, one full of disasters and one providing us with the disaster that is today's movie...
Y'know, funny thing, I was actually reading a little bit about this movie just last week. In particular, I was looking at information about Disney films, and found the career of the guy who directed The Black Cauldron somewhat fascinating. Together with long-time veteran Ted Berman, Richard Rich (no relation to the infamous Harvey Comics character) directed what many consider Disney's absolute worst theatrical animated film, and certainly one of its biggest flops at the box office. I don't think it's all that bad, questionable choices regarding the bustiness of the witches aside, but going off of his IMDB page, its bombing probably cost Rich a job with Disney. The vast, vast majority of his work since then has been direct-to-video short animations based off of various parts of the Bible or the lives of prominent historical figures, but what little work he's done on the film side of things since makes me think he's spent the last 30 or so years trying to prove to Disney that he can do what they do just as well and on his own.
Musicals based off of traditional fairy-tale material worked out? How about The Swan Princess? Wackier, less than family friendly fare gets an adaptation in the late 90s? Here's The King And I, what'd you think of that? Religious stuff coming out of Disney's new big competitor gets success with The Prince of Egypt? I've totally got religious stuff, try Muhammad: The Last Prophet. And sequel after sequel after sequel to any of his ventures that make even the slightest little bit of money at the box office, including four sequels to today's film.
And today's film, for those of you who don't read the URL or the title for some ungodly reason, is Alpha and Omega, or as I like to call it: Richard Rich Desperately Tries To Make Dreamworks Rip-Offs Work For Him After Disney and Dreamworks Copycatting Failed. It is, without a doubt, a pretty awful movie, and this is coming from someone who willingly went to see Open Season when it was in theaters and liked it. In short, it's just another attempt to do a CGI cartoon and ride the wave of Dreamworks' success - or, like I noted up there, the wave of crappy Dreamworks wannabes who think vulgar and pointless is the formula for success. I didn't like it, but as per usual I'm obliged to actually write a review here, so what're you gonna do?
The film's story supposedly concerns two packs of wolves in the Canadian tundra at odds against one another over which pack gets to hunt the caribou herd in their valley, and the tensions that arise when an important member of one pack goes missing just before a wolf marriage type thing that would unite the packs. With tensions rising, it's a race against time before bloodshed begins and the two packs tear each other apart. It's not a terribly original story, but something of interest could come out of normally sociable animals going feral.
Too bad the ACTUAL plot of the movie involves alpha wolf Kate and omega wolf Humphrey enacting out the same no-stakes high-class loves low-class story for the billionth time, except with even less to bring to the tired story than most other iterations. The two of them are the exact same overconfident teenage girl and cock empty-headed teenage boy you get in every story of this type, hauled off to a new park in Idaho to repopulate and get thrust into an epic journey back home. Again, might be interesting stuff, if the two of them had any kind of chemistry or if the journey back was any kind of epic. As it stands, it's bland, boring, and uneventful.
None of the characters really stand out unless they're badly designed, like the golfing goose who pops in to give Kate and Humphrey advice on the way home. If they're not hard to look at, they're all just wolves with grey-black or gold-brown fur - a few characters who I think were meant to look different but all just wind up looking the same. The environments are northwestern forests designed to the barest minimum of functionality, and despite some cursory efforts to throw in an action scene or two, it simply isn't fun or engaging to look at. I am by no means an expert on animation or visual design, but if I don't want to look at it for the whole length of the film, or even just a fraction of the length, then it's a failure.
Beyond the twin failures of the story and look of the film, the choices made for the comedy also fall flat. It's all butt and thinly-veiled sex jokes. I wish I was joking here, but I'm not. There's a few jokes about the goose's nationality, and beyond that it's all either "howling together is totally like sex," or butt jokes. It's incredibly odd coming from a film produced by a man who directed a whole plethora of watered-down, family-friendly Bible stories. You'd expect even the tiniest bit of less than pure humor to be beyond his reach, and yet... "Shove his tail up his butt." "I'm gonna pretend mosquitos bit my butt so I can shove dirt in this guy's face." "Get your butt out of my face." "Oh no, I'm about to ram into a caribou's butt." "There's one moon I don't want to howl at." All butt jokes, none of them funny, none of them inventive, just... butts.
It's weird. I don't subscribe to the notion that Shrek's success with off-color comedy and a less than serious story absolutely ruined animation - I think some of the best stuff the medium has ever seen, indeed, the best mainstream stuff, has come out SINCE Shrek - but at the same time, the films that achieve mainstream success that aren't good films seem to have gotten worse. Maybe it's because when you try to copy the low-brow without understanding what makes it work, you really don't have anywhere to go but down, but the sort of crap most non-Disney and Dreamworks studios try to pass as kids films because kids supposedly aren't as discerning just feels crappier than ever. I'm certain there were bad animated kids films before Shrek, and I'm all but certain a fair deal of them were worse than shit like Alpha and Omega due to the general lack of respect animation was afforded after the failure of Fantasia. Yet some part of me just can't help but feel like we're in an era with both the best of the best and the worst of the worst.
Blegh. Sorry. I'm talking out of line again. My area of study is supposed to be the cognitive-behavioral aspect of human psychology and how to treat mental problems and everyday issues using an understanding of said aspects, not the history of animation and family entertainment. I watch and read the work of people who have a lot more meaningful stuff to say about these things - my job here is just to say if a movie I picked at random is any good or not.
And Alpha and Omega isn't good. It's not blatantly or deliberately offensive (even the constant butt jokes have more an air of someone laughing at a naughty word than an attempt to shock or offend), but that's about the best I can say for it. It introduces its main character to me by having him bobsledding down a rocky mountain in a log, mess up, get launched out, and bump into his love interest for a midair dead eyed loving stare. There aren't any attempts to make me care about him, or think he's someone I should laugh at, or look at him as a cypher for other, more interesting characters. He, along with every other character and event in the movie, fails to interest me, and looks ugly and unappealing while doing so to boot.
I wish I could end this review by saying the movie at least doesn't waste any potentially interesting new ideas - the two tribes with mounting tensions plot might have been interesting, but it's definitely been done before - yet even on that merit the film fails. For some of its howling as sex scenes, it plays around with the notion of wolves howling as a means of conveying music. The only time I can think of this being explored before is in Twilight Princess, and here the filmmakers had an opportunity to work with the concept beyond just rehashing old Zelda tunes as howls. But nope, it's just somewhat melodic howling set to what I was tempted to call a pop song I don't know before finding out the film has an entirely original score. Yet another potentially interesting idea completely squandered.
Alpha and Omega is outright bad, and yet somehow it has four direct-to-video sequels, with three more on the way. I can't understand for the life of me who keeps shelling out enough money for these things. I'm tempted to say furries based on the sheer length of the TV Tropes pages on these films, but I'd like to think the furry community has more integrity than that. Whoever keeps buying these and showing them to their children, I just don't understand you. I might not have the life experience to fully GET what trying to raise a child can be like, but I understand it's wearying and really, really hard. That's no excuse for not exposing your child to better material. Even the Scooby-Doo film that came out the same year would be better than this.
(Assorted thoughts:
- The film ends with a dedication to to Dennis Hopper, who died shortly after completing his voice work, and I can't help but feel it's more a slap in the face than an honorable dedication.
- Near as I can tell, the biggest thing the guy who voiced Humphrey did aside from this was the Mac in Apples I'm A Mac And I'm A PC commercials. Doesn't really say a lot of great things about career trajectory.
- What kind of name is Humphrey for a wolf anyways?
- The film has no less than four logsledding sequences, and they all use what looks like the exact same camera-work for the first-person shots.
- There was also a subplot about the other pack's young male alpha and Kate's best friend falling in love, but I don't give a shit about it, so this is all the mention it gets.)
School's starting this week, so don't be surprised if updates get a little hazier as I try to work out a schedule and find some steady work.
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