Advertising
Supported by
For a movie about magic cookies, this animated adventure takes its time to establish a fundamental principle.
By Ben Kenigsberg
When you purchase a price ticket for an independently qualified movie on our website, we earn an associate fee.
In this animated feature film for children, cookies with magical animals are transformed into circus animals. Do you want to be a lion, an elephant or a hamster? Simply untie the corresponding cookie.
However, one way or another, the film takes an hour to identify this concept. The film, directed through Tony Bancroft and Scott Christian Sava and based on a graphic novel through Sava, is set as a John Steinbeck tome for kindergarten children. It opened in 1962 and tells decades of romance and bad blood in a circus family. The story features neither one nor two treacherous blond petimetres (expressed through Ian McKellen and Patrick Warburton) and a completely different set of cookies. (Raven-Symoné expresses the voice of a scientist looking to invent a new type of dog biscuit).
Such ambition is rare in cartoons about magic snacks, and is probably praised for its sheer perversity. However, the ostensible impressions here are burlesque pleasures, such as seeing the hero, Owen (John Krasinski), who, to recap the lineage, is the nephew of two rival track masters and met his wife Zoe, (Emily Blunt), in the circus: become a giant bear.
Vocal skill (Wallace Shawn as a dog cookie mogul, Danny DeVito as a fearsome clown, Sylvester Stallone as a human cannonball and a Tennyson enthusiast) is also well placed above the heads of potential spectators. The separate and blobular animation, on the other hand, will do little to awaken the eye of the children’s visual mind, and the songs sung through McKellen are painful in their softness. Even in a film whose feature is redundancy, this has been the first thing that has been done.
Animal biscuits Duration: 1 hour forty-five minutes. Watch it on Netflix.
Advertising