El diario de Greg

Here are the main points I would like to make about this movie

Pros:

• This movie follows the book very well. Everything happens in the same order, which I find to be nice. I do think that this movie follows the storyline of the book better than the live action films.

• It is very nice to see Greg and his world in a fresh animation (manny is literally cursed.. the other characters are fine)

Cons:

• The voice acting throughout this movie isn't very "high-quality" Sometimes the characters' voices don't really capture the emotion as much as I would expect, and sometimes Susan Heffley sounds like her audio was recorded in a car..
• While the fresh animation style is nice, it seems unfinished. This movie seems to be experimental, like the animation isn't finished yet.

Well...it's better than The Long Haul? Cause, you know...that's so hard to do...

I don't know, I guess it's possible I'm being blinded by my nostalgia for the original trilogy and I would have been happy if those original actors never aged and they could have kept adapting this whole book series, but I think it's equally possible that what I'm really being blinded by is this uuuuuuugly animation.

I don't know if I'd consider this series to be something that would work better in live action or not, but I do know that if you took the drawings of an 11 year old and transcribed them into a 3D setting, you'd get...well, this. And if you think about that concept while pretending this film never existed, does it sound like a good idea? Because this film does exist, and pretty clearly, it wasn't a good idea. Why couldn't it have just been animated in exactly the same way as the book's illustrations, just with some colour added? I can't imagine how much more appealing that would have looked.

Even if you can ignore the *shudder* character designs, the whole thing looks so cheap. Sometimes, on my university campus, they show the animation students' work on a big screen on one of the buildings. The animation students who obviously don't exactly have a huge budget, and this really doesn't look too far from what they can do. The models all look untextured, the lip-syncing is pretty bad, and it all feels so flat. Ironic that it being 2D would have worked so much better.

And I'm just now learning that this was Jeff Kinney's idea. Just like how he actually wrote the script for The Long Haul. Why do you hate your own creation, Jeff? Are you just sick of the whole thing? Am I lucky that I stopped reading the books around 2014, and if I continued, I would have been met with crap like this?

Because the animation certainly isn't the only thing wrong with this. The voice acting is dull and forgettable, it's not very well directed, the story is pretty boring, at least when it's presented like this, and I chuckled maybe...three times?

Granted, that's three times as much as The Long Haul, and I will at least applaud the fact that this film really did keep a laser focus on Greg and Rowley's friendship and is at least very short so I didn't suffer for too long, and I actually did quite like the changes they made to the Halloween sequence, but for all that...curse you entropy, why can't you just leave those original actors alone and let them make more of those films?

It occurred to me while watching this just how much that original cast really made those films as special as they are to me, because you take them out, and suddenly you have this. You take them out, and I'm not gonna like it.

'Diary Of A Wimpy Kid (2021)' is a poor excuse of an adaptation. In fact, it's a poor excuse of a film. It just feels incredibly lazy. There's no reason for the thing to run a measly fifty-eight minutes, especially not when it cuts out considerable chunks of its source material to do so. It also lacks any semblance of structure, seeming more like a series of skits than an actual cohesive story. Each segment only has the loosest of consequences, and the overall piece lacks any real sense of escalation. I've read that it was initially planned as an animated series, which may explain why it's so short and lacks a solid structure; it's just a series of episodes smushed into one barely-feature-length feature film. They'll probably pump out another fifteen of these (one for each book) in the span of about five years. It's really underwhelming overall. For something so short, it sure is dull. The animation is plain bad, with weirdly low-effort character designs and generally unconvincing movement. It would've probably been better if the picture retained the style it adopts for its first few moments, one which emulates the crude drawings of the book using 2D animation that looks as though it's occurring on wrinkled sheets of lined paper (i.e. Within the eponymous diary). The characters are paper thin, too. What's worse is that only one of them is likeable, and he isn't even the protagonist. I get that Greg is meant to be selfish, jealous and so concerned with being cool that he can't see what's truly important (or that the obsession itself is what's primarily preventing him from being considered so). However, there's no real characterisation outside of these negative aspects, which leaves you feeling totally alienated from him. You're honestly more likely to cheer than cry when he gets laughed at. Ultimately, though, this just feels like nothing. It isn't engaging and it isn't enjoyable. It genuinely feels like the filmmakers don't care about it. If that's the case, how could they ever expect us to? Also, Rodrick is only in it for (literally) about two minutes. #notmyrodrick. 3/10.

It's just so difficult to review or rate a new Diary of a Wimpy Kid movie without comparing it to the original three. The concept was cool, but it really failed to deliver a consistent story.

Overall 5/10.

This film barely represented the main book at all. The main flow was there, but they added all these other characters or events just so the movie could be less than an hour. The animation is poor and lazy, and most definitely not one of Disney's best.

I'm still giving it 4 stars because at the end of the day, this movie is targeted toward younger viewers and if I were watching through the mind of a child I would like this film a lot. However, it's only natural that I compare this film to the other 4 live-action films, and this one doesn't stand a chance against any of them, even the reboot.

The comedy is not funny and the kids should not be in middle school, but the design style is so poor I wouldn't be able to tell.

The voice actors did their job nicely, nothing much to say expect for the voice actor of Greg's mother. She sounds like she recorded all her lines in her dining room, using her laptop's built in microphone.

4/10, would not watch again.