Animaniacs: El Deseo de Wakko

This was a great movie from a great cartoon series. The animation was top notch. This movie had the same quality of humor as the series. The premise was pretty good and fitting for the characters. All the characters from the show are used in some form and are just as hilarious as they are in the show. Thumbs up on this one.

Just saw this on HBO, did anyone catch the not-so-hidden reference to the Time-Warner merger of 1996? In the opening sequence, the town of "Warnerstock" (not-so-subtle) was all happy and prosperous until the king passed away and the evil king of "Ticktocia" (tic-toc...Time maybe?) took control through a hostile takeover. the people of Warnerstock were forced to turn a profit...and so-on and so-on. The show was always full of obscure and adult references cleverly and tastefully hidden and mixed with the kiddie humor. Maybe an expression of some internal riff with the whole merger, 'cleverly' displayed in Animaniac fashion.

Wakko's wish is a very worthy finale to the series. While some have complained that it isn't like the show at all, I don't really think it is meant to be. Nor should it. Does anyone really want to see 90 minutes of out and out zanyness? Instead, we get a rather touching story that gives all the characters and emotional weight they never really had before. And of course, we still get the zanyness, it's just placed within a larger framework.

Personally, I would love to see more Animaniacs stories done in this exact style (hope hope hope!).

With Wakko's Wish, Animaniacs ends it's run with a solid piece of work, very unlike the show in many ways, and for that I am glad. Nothing could have been worse for it to finish with something that was basically just another episode.

Wakko's Wish does what Animaniacs fans have come to expect, and in fact demand. The story is entertaining at multiple levels, from the purely visual, to the slapstick, to clever wordplay, to subtle cultural references that surface on watching for the second or third time.

It may look like it is a Disney-esque thing. If you expect that, you may be uneasy when Wakko's Wish gives it what-for and does what Warner Bros. cartoons have always done: had fun with things and not let anyone or anything off the hook.

"Animaniacs" was a cartoon that always struck me as good but highly inconsistent. At any given time there were at least two dozen characters on the show. Each of them starred in their own segments. Some of them worked, some of them didn't. And some of them fell flat.

This problem is finally eliminated in "Wakko's Wish". All of the characters, good (the Warners, Pinky and the Brain), bad (the Goodfeathers, the Hip Hippos), and pointless (Chicken Boo) are involved in this one major story. The story is a tad sentimental for an "Animaniacs" movie but they have a lot of fun parodying the expected cliches as they go along. Check it out, it's a lot of fun. And it's got "Tiny Toons: Summer Vacation" beat by miles.