Re-Animated

It's hard to believe that Renegade Animation, the studio that produced Hi Hi Puffy AmiYumi (one of my ALL TIME favorite Cartoon Network shows), went on to produce THIS atrocity!! A movie about a kid who gets hit by a train at a Disneyworld knock-off, and was revived with a brain transplant??!! This feels like a Nickelodeon or Disney Channel original movie on crack. It's not funny (though it is unintentionally sometimes), it's really cringe-worthy, it's edited horrible, and it's way too random. Nothing about this movie makes sense. This acts so much like a cartoon. Hell, Ned's Declassified School Survival Guide had a REASON to be a live-action Nickelodeon sitcom that acts like a cartoon. It seems is though that Cartoon Network DID NOT learn from Big Bag, when it comes to live-action. This was produced in the Jim Samples era, but the series was produced in the Stuart Snyder era. This is crazy!! In every possible meaning of the word!! NOTHING ABOUT THIS MOVIE MAKES ANY SENSE!!! IT IS PURE BULLSPIT!!!! Also, this movie was given special thanks to Craig McCracken and Sam Register. FOR WHAT??!! THEY DIDN'T WANT THIS THING TO HAPPEN!!!! Cartoon Network wanted to make Drop Dead Fred with a twist of Cool World, they made this. This movie sucks.

Not going to do a full review of this movie but going to cover the basics of why this movie is horrible. One this was around the time CN was experimenting with adding live programming to the mix... this movie was a prime example of why this was bad... movie like batman are forgivable cause batman has a cartoon counterpart... this movie strives to be in the tradition of cartoon live action hybrids... but felt more like an attempt to create a satire of the concept of humor. The plot is ludicrous, boy get hit by a train needs brain surgery has pseudo-Walt Disney's brain put in his head and starts seeing things. Not ghosts like the kid in the 6th sense, but toons, not funny ones either... but barely funny dollar store mascot looking toons. Of course then the movie continues going on trying to make a story with things like a green girl, bad guys trying to get the brain back and boring to the point of absurdity action scenes... the movie feels like CN was trying to force it down viewers throats not really giving any place to offer feedback at the time... probably because they had out of jimmy's head planned... after this the Gary Coleman show and its TV movie feel like masterpieces.

Painfully atrocious. Reminiscent of a middle school play with flash animations. I stopped watching the first time. But I was profoundly conflicted. I really wanted to see the animated characters but I couldn't endure the unbearably awkward line deliveries.

What I feel is the worst part, you have Cartoon Network plugging the movie like it's the best thing since Roger Rabbit but they don't put the money and time necessary to make the film halfway watchable. This coming from a channel that claims to be the best place for cartoons. In all, the film is a serious let down and contrary to the expectations one would have of of major, multi-million dollar network devoted to animation.

I would, however, like to see more of just Golly and the gang. The film was a horrible misuse of the talented voice cast. I can't believe that was Ellen Greene. The animation was decent for CN's standards but more fitting for a fully animated setting rather than haphazardly layered on top of a real world setting. The plot doomed the movie from the beginning but the characters were affable enough to merit some more development, in a more suitable setting.

The short info on the movie is that it has an adopted alien sister (whom is about the only sane character in the movie), a boring kid star, a mentally feeble father figure, an utterly clueless astronaut mother, and a girlfriend who provides exposition (explanation dialog).

The summary of the plot (this movie is agonizingly bad to watch) involves the pot-fueled writers (whom wouldn't know a decent joke if it was jumping upon their windpipes) who decided that a young boy getting a "brain transplant" (while still retaining his entire memories, personality, and intelligence) would somehow magically get the ability to see the animated memories of the original owner of the brain. As you can understand, much like any person whom has the intellect greater than a goldfish, this plot is SEVERELY RETARDED.

At any rate, the child of the former animation studio is now grown, and the unentertaining character of Sonny just hams up his every appearance in his attempts to kill off the even more boring "brain transplant" boy. The whole thing just drags on like getting a tooth drilled at the dentist. GAH! Even 60 minutes of this is AGONIZING. The alien adopted sister is about the only worthwhile character of the whole movie. I am really wishing all of the characters, aside from the alien sister, die painfully.

The director of this movie is utterly incompetent as there is nothing compelling to continue watching it. The editor of the movie has no idea what is going on as the pacing of the "action" and "comedy" are not timed out at all to any emotional effect. The musical bits which are supposed to score out the emotional moments, the dramatic bits, the depressing scenes, and the comedy just appears to be randomly thrown in for no effect at all. The actors (not including the alien sister) seem to be putting no serious effort in reacting to the antics of Sonny (whom is putting some energy into his scenes, but lacking proper musical scoring has no emotional impact to the viewer and thusly results in a boring waste of movement). The photography is well lit and the camera-work is competent. The audio is clean for the most part, but edited utterly worthlessly.

If I were running the studio that slapped this bit of trash together, I'd fire the film editor, not rehire the non-reactive actors, slap the unfunny writers a few times then fire the unfunny writers, and fire the audio editor (if that is the person responsible for not knowing when to score in the emotional musical bits properly and using way too much noisy "dead air noise" to fill in the blank dialog spots). The audio has a the constant sound of a fan running in the background whenever the audio drops to a quiet spot. The only saving grace of this movie is not having the disturbing JonBenet Ramsey clone of Dakota Fanning (shivers at the thought of that creepy little girl) in it. So if you want to torture your children, buy this movie on DVD. Only the most rotten of children deserve to endure a horrible boring movie like this.

What happens when you combine low-budget vector animation with amateur actors? Certainly nothing comparable to "Who Framed Roger Rabbit?". That's not to say that my problems with this movie are that it doesn't measure up to a very good movie like "Who Framed Roger Rabbit?", no, it would be quite unfair to knock it just because it's no where near as good. There are plenty of OTHER problems with this "movie" to fault it on. So, the "... Roger Rabbit" comparisons stop here... for now.

The first, and most obvious problem with this movie, is the casting. Obviously they had a small budget to work with. That's the only thing that can explain why they'd choose a cast full of actors that rate mediocre, at best. These actors are almost as "good" as actors you'd expect to see on a kids' sitcom on Nickelodeon and the Disney Channel. Even the voice actors are bad, and that's amazing. Amazing because Cartoon Network normally employs some of the best voice actors in the country to work on their animated shows. So yes, the acting is bad. Quite bad. Only pre-teens could watch the movie without noticing this fault, and even so, it's insulting to make entertainment for kids and expect them to be ignorant of all its faults. The casting was terrible.

Then there's the extremely racially ignorant casting choice of selecting Eunice Cho and Micah Karns to play the role of Japanese kids whose family surname is "Yoshida." News flash: Asian ethnicities are not interchangeable. These kids don't have an ounce of Japanese heritage, and should not be cast to play Japanese characters; they don't look Japanese, not a bit. The decision to cast them borders on racism by reinforcing the stereotype that "all Asians look the same." In fact, these kids are so far from looking Japanese that you'd have to be brain dead or downright ignorant to ever mistake either of them for one. On the other hand, their grandparents ARE played by Japanese actors, and speak Japanese in their scenes. That only worsens the perceived racial stereotype here, as it paints a clear picture of what race the family is supposed to be while the kids are clearly of vastly different heritage. You really would have to be ignorant to not see the difference between them. Or a child. Great, let's help reinforce the stereotype by subjecting children to actors of mixed Asian races and telling them that they're supposed to be related somehow.

As for the animation, the other half of the "acting" in this movie, to most it will appear fairly decent. To big fans of animation, it's noticeably low-budget. They used a vector graphics animating program, i.e. Flash, for all of the animation. So, it looks very "tweeny," quite flat, often like paper cut-outs. While it's decent animation, it's still stiff and flat animation, and the characters don't move as fluidly as cartoons you'd see in a Disney film.

The plot of the movie was built around the rumor that Walt Disney's brain was put into cryogenic storage, so "Milt Appleday" represents Walt Disney and the cartoons and theme park are meant to be parodies of Disney's work. However, these Flash animated cartoons are no where near as lively as traditional cartoons like those made by Disney (or at least Walt Disney's Disney). It stands out when the characters almost "float" around, look completely superficial, when they aren't shaded to fit into the scene, when they seem like they were just slapped into the frame with little attempt to really assimilate them into the scene. I know I said I wouldn't make any more comparisons to "Who Framed Roger Rabbit?", but just watch that film and see how much more believable the animated characters are in that movie. They really do fit into the scenes shot in the real world. That's why at least one comparison must be made, as "Who Framed Roger Rabbit?" was one of the best films to put animated characters into the real world with real actors. The characters in "Reanimated" stick out like sore thumbs in the real world. Sore, tween-animated Flash thumbs. That style of animation is great when it's applied to a great stylized cartoon like "Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends." But, it's a bit disappointing in its application in "Reanimated," where they stand in as parodical representations of Walt Disney's cartoons.

Overall, the movie is just barely "watchable" for younger audiences, but anyone in the teens and up will have a hard time stomaching the acting. Given the large amount of advertising and hype they've put into this movie, you'd think they'd have given it a decent budget to hire decent actors and bump the animation up from cost-effective "tweeny" computer animation to something traditionally fully-animated. There's really no excuse for the bounty of low-budget choices in the production of "Reanimated," this is Cartoon Network, a pretty big powerhouse in cable entertainment. For them to pump out and hype up such a mediocre piece of work is almost insulting to their viewers.