Rating: 3 of 5  

I don’t know why I bother rating animated movies, except that in some ways these reviews are my own version of collecting movie stubs.

But I can’t really rate directing. I know it happens and I know it’s important but I don’t really understand how it works in an animated film. Production is always “yeah, that looked good” because the animation is almost always a reflection of our current level of technology and, yeah, it looks good. Performances are just really voices and they’re always good.

The only thing that really differentiates one animated movie from another is the writing. And that’s rarely bad. It kind of sways from good enough to brilliant. This one was somewhere in the middle.

Because it wasn’t brilliant. It aspired to be, but the theme they were trying to explore was kind of just talked about instead of truly evoked. There wasn’t quite as much plot as I was expecting. And it wasn’t really a new fairy tale even though it kind of wanted to be.

But the characters were all good. In fact, the secondary characters provided incredible support to the main ones, keeping the movie from feeling quite as flimsy as it actually was. And it was funny. Not just cute every now and then but actually silly, smart, funny.

All of which works for a kid’s movie.

Writing:
Characters:
Performances:
Directing:
Production:
Overall: