Diary of a Wimpy Kid

I've noticed Disney Plus is starting their new tradition that they're gonna start doing these kinds of films every year. And the 2021 Diary of a Wimpy Kid has given it to, well, quite a passible start. I'll be quite honest, I think I liked the live action film better than this one. But at least I obviously take this over The Long Haul any day. I do appreciate the effort of adapting to the book well, but the movie is too short for the story to show its first impression. The animation is okay, but it can be dated. The comedy can be fun to show a life in school like in the books, but it can end up a hit and miss. And the characters could've gotten the best than the live action films, but they feel off with Greg being stubborn to his own friend. I do get the same thing with the first live action film, but worse in this one. I know there will be Diary of a Wimpy Kid fans that grew up with the books and the live action films that would desire to watch a movie like this every year, starting with this one. So they probably have a good time with this one. However considering this is a short movie, I would recommend to treat this more like a special. It may not be the big zoo wee mama moment, but at least Disney Plus made a decent first impression with making more Diary of a Wimpy Kid movies.

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.

Only thought there were a few funny parts, most notable sequence was Fregley's house. They cut out really important parts from the book, (including the saftey patrol), plus only 2 minutes of Rodrick? They also made Greg likeable, which is not something you should do. Go watch the live action, this is very boring and mostly unfunny.

'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.