Die Schutzbrüder

The English voice acting is horrible! I only loved Meryl Streep's narration!

When it comes to children's animation I usually like to cut the film makers some slack for making an attempt at family films. But there is little to love about this film. From the poor choice of music to the head-scratcher story (what exactly was the moral trying to be portrayed here?) to the ultra-cliche characters, this one misses on just about every cylinder.

The real problem was the plot and story line. Exactly what were the writers and directors trying to teach here? That the way to accomplish good is to create extreme bad? Such philosophical nonsense is not a story to teach young children. It's a little difficult to tell who is the good guy and who is the bad here. The sub-plot of the bad-guy competitor is unnecessary to the main story... or is the main story a sub-plot of the evil competitive restaurateur? Hard to tell.

While the sight-gags are understandable for young children (the fart gags might gain a laugh from the 7-&-under audience), they might leave older children and adults cold. (Characters fighting over a lone bathroom because they all have quote "diarrhea" unquote... isn't all that funny.)

The cliche characters and questionable theme serve to make this an hour and a half wasted. The animation is good, the sound is well-mixed (except for the iffy American song choices). Beyond that, one can give this a pass. I don't know whether this is a case of Asian film lost in the Americanization... or if it was simply poor to start with, but it was a yawner by the 20 minute mark and didn't much improve in the remaining time.

I started watching this movie on Netflix, but the music and the voice acting was just so extremely bad that out of curiosity I decided to see how the original was in comparison. Man, it was so much better. The english version is not just bad voice acting, they completely changed the dialogue and inserted a lot of out-of-date pop references (to star wars and ubers for example) and horrible pop songs and cringe. The original version had none of these references, and nice and calm melodic music instead of the pop songs, so the literal mood of the movie was lost in translation. The Netflix version also literally cut out some parts of the movie. I'd give the american version a 1, but the chinese version gets 5 stars (that's quite high for me).

Yikes, the voice work in this movie is awful. It's like a layer out of place.. And while it is visually interesting in some parts the movement and dialogue is just BAD... The pacing, developments and everything in it feels wrong. The Seal-breaking scenes are the only saving grace (mostly anything Yu Lei related), and the drawn animation of the "monster".. aside from that, the story is not explained enough, doesn't make sense and feels dumb at times.

I wonder if watching this in another language would make this a tad better. Also, there's too many farts..

I don't choose to watch dubbed versions but in this case, Netflix didn't exactly give me a choice. Nicole Kidman's awful attempt at voice acting was awful. Literally sounded like she had just received the script and read it during recording.