Zach’s Zany Movie Reviews: OVER THE MOON (Netflix)

This review is going to be a bit biased, seeing how I called into work an extra day last week and my 3 year old sat by me, snuggled, and paid attention to the entire one hour and thirty five minute run time of this movie. Totally worth it. OVER THE MOON, if you watch it, might seem a little bit generic to you, and it is unless you are familiar with Chang’e, the Chinese Goddess of the Moon and her history in their culture’s folklore. It’s another one of those “learning acceptance to change” adventures, where a young girl, who lost her mother four years earlier to what I presume was cancer, is about to be integrated into another half family. The father fell in love with another woman after his wife’s death, and this woman has her own son she is going to bring into this new family. The young girl, who’s name is Fei Fei, gets upset and doesn’t want to accept this change or get over her mother’s death, so she builds her own rocket ship and blasts off to the moon (I presume this entire movie was in Fei Fei’s head), hoping to meet this Chang’e and prove that she is real. Fei Fei also hopes that she can help Chang’e (DO YOU GET IT YET?!? CHANGE!!!) with her romantic tragedy described in her folklore and in return maybe the goddess can help Fei Fei deal with the tragedy of her mother’s death. Tit for tat, if you will. The movie is a computer-animated musical adventure family dramedy, and it is a solid, albeit, very familiar film. Maybe because it has a lot of similar beats of another film produced by the same company, Abominable (my son’s first film in a movie theater). It’s a little fishy that Over The Moon is the only second film produced by Pearl Studios, yet it borrows (and sometimes blatantly rips off) their first produced film. This film has been getting some Oscar buzz for Best Animated Movie and the reason for that is that this is the last film written by storyteller Audrey Wells (she died of cancer in 2018), who brilliantly adapted the novel The Hate U Give into one of my favorite films of 2018. The film was directed by Glen Keane, who at age 66, and former supervising animator at Disney with classics on his resume such as Pete’s Dragon, The Rescuers, Aladdin, and Beauty In The Beast, gets his first gig directing an entire feature. These reasons were probably why Netflix was over the moon to produce and distribute this film…pun intended.

But the movie is good I promise. There are several great musical numbers, more so than the mediocre Frozen 2, and the film’s animation is bright and mesmerizing…at least to young children as my son kept saying “wow” throughout his experience. Hamilton’s Phillipa Soo, who was also recently in The Broken Hearts Gallery which was a good movie but didn’t really showcase any of her vocal talents, is in this, and uses her talents gloriously. She voices Chang’e, and her opening introductory number was a memorable enough song that I’m still humming it out loud randomly almost a week later. The voice acting is great all around here, with Ken Jeong playing a pangolin (funny if you consider the multiple stories of the origin of COVID-19) who is not introduced until an hour into the film for some odd reason, but it was just enough not to have Jeong over do it and become annoying. I tagged Sandra Oh and John Cho in this article, but don’t watch this based on just those two names alone as they have less than 15 lines between the two of them. It’s really the Phillipa Soo, Cathy Ang (Fei Fei), and Robert Chiu (stepbrother Chin) show as they are present for most of the run time, and they all voice act their hearts out. Soo and Chiu have a fun, musical, rhythmic ping pong tournament competing for a McGuffin prize, there is a hilariously fun motorcycle gang of antagonist biker ‘chicks’, and the ending, while predictable as all get out, will probably make your eyes release several pent up tears of emotion. The whole problem I had with the movie was the familiarity and predictable nature of it, so if that kind of plot beat for beat shit doesn’t bother you, then you will enjoy this movie even more so than I did. Netflix, from what I can tell, at least has an eye for their original animated films even though most of their live action ones are crap. I am over the moon that the streak isn’t broken…again…pun intended.

Zach’s Zany Movie Reviews: TROLLS WORLD TOUR

“Patience is a virtue. Especially when it comes to $19.99 PVOD rentals.” – Zachary James Alexander

I know I had a couple of guest reviewers take a shot at their thoughts for TROLLS WORLD TOUR a couple of months ago when they foolishly paid $19.99 for a 48 hour rental. Want to guess how much I paid? $5. The kids Universal Dreamworks Animation film was available to rent regularly this week, and since my young little boy likes that kind of shit with a lot of music in it, five bucks seemed like a pretty good deal. And my verdict? It’s honestly not that bad, in fact, I would say it is a superior sequel, as I can’t even remember for the life of me what happened in the first movie, other than I knew I was bored to tears and didn’t care for it. So what made me think this one was decent? Well, it’s really just a harmless 90 minute music video meant for kids and teaches them that all races of people, no matter the skin color or personality, can and should live in harmony. Errr, wait a minute, I said that wrong. It teaches them that all of the different Trolls, with their different varieties and preferred kinds of music, can and should live in harmony. Ah, that’s better. The movie flies by in a fast and frantic pace and is really the movie that Frozen II should’ve been when trying to incorporate political and social messages into its themes. Frozen II went wayyyyyy too dark for children and its end message of “anti-Trump wall and racist values” was eye roll worthy. Argue with me all you want, I proved with instances in my Frozen II review that it was all there. Trolls World Tour is much more light-hearted and doesn’t get too dark even though it still kind of annoyingly wears its messages on its sleeve.

Per IMDB, it describes Trolls World Tour as: “When the Queen of the Hard Rock Trolls tries to take over all the Troll kingdoms, Queen Poppy and her friends try different ways to save all the Trolls.” To add on to that description, the Queen of The Hard Rock Trolls is actually trying to steal all of the Troll kingdoms musical strings (Pop, Funk, Classical, Techno and Country) and convert all of them to JUST hard rock. So basically Hard Rock is Nazi Germany in this instance. Oh, also, half way through the film they mention that the Troll World Map is “outdated” and that there are many more kinds of different trolls and music out there now. See what I mean when I say that it wears its messages on its sleeve? However, it’s harmless and tolerable because of how bright and chipper every story beat is to the very end, even on a 2 second downer note in the climax. It manages to still be a purely innocent kids movie, something that Frozen III should probably take notes on before the script and songs are written for that film in several years. There aren’t many original songs here, the film mostly consists of remixes of current and older songs that you might’ve enjoyed personally or with family and friends over the years. And the remixes are actually kind of cool and catchy. Anna Kendrick, Rachel Bloom, Justin Timberlake and others sing their hearts out in this, and it all sounds good and is enjoyable…to a degree for me.

I’m not saying the movie is great, it’s just half way decent. Probably because my expectations were quite low when hitting that play button. But my young son liked it and my wife and I paid attention to it. I got a little more out of it than I was expecting. Heck, I even laughed out loud a couple of times. Mostly scenes that involved Kenan Thompson, as a new troll named Tiny Diamond, whenever he would open his mouth and then a very dry humorish, 2 second, blind-and-you’ll-miss-it laugh involving a troll shaking its ass right in front of another troll’s face who is not amused (it happens in the country Troll scene if you are on the look out for it). There is also a side B, C & D plots that involve Timberlake’s troll actually being able to be in love with Kendrick’s troll (that’s what she said), a troll that lived in the Pop Music part of the world who realizes he’s actually from a different part of it, and a pinky promise that have tiny little pay offs that weren’t too shabby. I can’t stress this enough, it’s a harmless kids movie. It’s not as terrible as some of my friends and professional critics are making it out to be and it’s not the greatest movie ever that probably flew out of some kids mouths while in quarantine. It’s serviceable, it’s there, it easily kills 90 minutes of your boring quarantine life time. You will either jam to the beat of the music or, at the bare minimum, nod your head to it. It’s definitely not worth the $19.99 rental it was in April, but is sure more than a bargain at $5 now.

Zach’s Zany Movie Reviews: THE WILLOUGHBYS (Netflix)

Netflix sure is stepping up their game when it comes to animated originals. THE WILLOUGHBYS is a fantastic, fun, original, yet weird kids movie that premiered back on the service in April, yet I didn’t hear about it until a recent visit to a friends place in Oklahoma for the weekend. I saw the release date was 2020, and following a recommendation from those friends’ kids that weekend, I decided to check it out. Boy am I glad I did. I’m glad I also waited to watch it with my young son and my wife, because we got to enjoy it together as a family. It’s based on the book by the famous Lois Lowry (I have never heard of this till now, who knew, right?!) and per IMDB it describes the film as: “Convinced they’d be better off raising themselves, the Willoughby children hatch a sneaky plan to send their selfish parents on vacation. The siblings then embark on their own high-flying adventure to find the true meaning of family.” And the whole story is fast paced loveliness with a dash of weird. It has colorful characters, morals about family that don’t try to hit you over the head with the messages, nice original animation that wasn’t trying to rip off anyone else’s work, and fantastic voice work from everyone involved, including, but not limited to: Ricky Gervais, Martin Short, Jane Krakowski, Terry Crews, Maya Rudolph, Alessia Cara (with a wonderful singing voice as well), and Will Forte (who really needed this, as his portrayal of Shaggy in the disappointing Scoob! just recently released seemed to be trying a bit too hard). This and Onward are the only two memorable animated films of the year so far.

This might only be a 2 paragraph review, as I don’t really want to spoil any of the surprises this film has in store for you and yours. Just know that other than the ending, this families predicament is far from predictable. Some wacky shit happens, some really cute shit happens, some dark shit happens, people are accidentally killed (well, if you see certain scenes from my eyes they did), tears will be shed, and smiles will be spread from cheek to cheek. This 2nd time director, Kris Pearn, whose first effort was Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs 2, is not a newbie to the animation world, as he worked in the animation departments for a ton of projects like Arthur Christmas, Open Season, and the very underrated Titan A.E. He and his crew do wonderful work here, as this is a film I can see revisiting with my family over and over and over again. After this and Klaus at the end of last year, Netflix really has something going on correctly with their animation productions. Why can’t they take that positive momentum and apply it to the original film department? Or hell, even what they choose to buy from other studios to put on their platform? Needless to say, I’ll always be weary with a new live-action Netflix original. However, I’ll be eager to press the play button if a new release from them is animated.