Spark: A Space Tail

Not the best animated feature I ever seen. I feel sorry for some of the stars in the movie like Jessica Biel, Susan Sarandon, Hilary Swank and Patrick Stewart who picked the wrong animated feature to voice. Possibly thought it was going to be a hit cause it was an animated feature.

The animation is very mediocre. Feels like there they created a program for generic computer animation that can spit out animation films that all look the same and Spark decided to use this instead of animators. Most importantly, the story was lame. I've seen the story a million times. One could point out that if you look at this hard enough you can see the same story as the Lion King in Spark, but that's not the point. Spark's vision to add their own twist to this story fell very short of being decent.

Wanted to like it but didn't happen.

http://cinemagardens.com

In the world of animation, only 5 animation studios can exist and have critically acclaimed and commercially successful movies: Walt Disney Animation Studios, Pixar Animation Studios, Dreamworks Animation, Illumination Entertainment and Blue Sky Studios(well, they make box office success at the least.....). This means that any other animation studios, especially foreign ones will have to live at the bottom of the barrel and try to sweep up any money that they can. This doesn't stop some from trying their best, and Toonbox Entertainment finally succeeded at something with the surprising success of The Nut Job. With a sequel already in place for this year, they fill in the gap with their new movie: Spark: A Space Tail. I mean, it can't be as bad as it looks right?

Sadly, it is a bad movie. The animation looks good at times, but the rest feels motionless and looks very plasticy. The voice acting sounds so weird that you swear this is a foreign dub of a movie, like Rock Dog. The characters are a special type of characters that i like to call "That Character". We have "The Chosen One", "The Big Bad", "The Power Sidekick" and so so much more. Oh by the way there's a HUUUUGGGEEEEEEEEE monster that's literally the Kraken: no it's named the Kraken!

This looks to be a big disappointment to what could have been a game changer like Shrek or Toy Story, but now looks like a turd. I guess if there's one that they will gain after this release, they may just get a new lesson in how to make a movie. (*** out of **********, NOT INTERESTED)

Rating chart Voice acting 4 Animation 5 Characters 3 Moral 3 World/setting 2 Humor 3 Story 2 Acting 4 Songs/soundtrack 5 Overall: 31/100

This review of Spark: A Space Tail is spoiler free

** (2/5)

IF CURIOUS GEORGE and Space Chimps left you feeling frustrated at their fun ideas yet dodgy final execution, which was perhaps left unfinished. Then writer-director Aaron Woodley's Spark: A Space Tail will leave you furious, an uncharismatic CG animation with a lot of ideas but left with a dodgy final execution.

Opening with Spark (Jace Norman) a high-spirited teenage chimpanzee who believes he can save his lost planet Bana - which was sucked up by a space kraken. He and his two best friends - a chubby Walrus Chunk (Rob deLeeuw), perhaps as a remake on the titular chubby Goonies character and a tough-hearted skinny fox named Vix (Jessica Biel). Together they go on a quest to save their homeland from evil overlord Zhong (A.C. Peterson). Plot-wise it's WALL-E and Star Wars, Spark lives on a distant planetary shard used as a junk yard, among his friends he has a green cockroach and a clunky old robot - Bananny (Susan Sarandon) for company. Quickly changing formula to another sci-fi epic namely Spark wielding a double-sided light sword perhaps as a reference to Darth Maul, yet a far less memorable one.

The ideas pile on from other references to sci-fi to pop culture, a lot goes on at any given moment but even the most fluid moments fail to finish or at least spark inspiration. At its best the animation is mediocrely primitive looking like it came out in 2005 - given that it shines the brightest light other ideas are left in the shadows. The third act shines the brightest, here the ideas come to a halt and it looks the most original, shining in the full glory of creativity. Here Spark learns of his true heritage, he learns that he is more than he thinks he is - armed with this knowledge he turns out to be a stronger leader.

Along with the piling ideas coming to an end there are a couple of gags namely Patrick Stewart's The Captain pulls the most laughs - hilariously getting struck by lighting and losing all memory of he is "Outstanding" he says when he learns pinnacle information about his body. He shines the brightest light; he proves to be the most charming and brings smiles to this bland animation. Spark: A Space Tail is a bland, uncharismatic and unmemorable animated comedy which has the space for creativity but lacks the spark of inspiration that it desperately needs to liftoff.

VERDICT: A mishmash of space romp combined with half-ish references, unfunny one-liners and an unremittingly charmless all-star cast which fails to achieve liftoff.

It's hard to believe that so many people made this film and yet nobody asked the question "Why cares about this story?".

I don't like having to work too hard trying to figure out the plot or what motivates the characters into action, but after ten minutes I was still asking myself "what's the point of this movie?".

For me the animation was fine. Had the story been a good one then I wouldn't care about how realistic the characters are portrayed - it's a kid's animation so I don't expect it to look lifelike.

But I did wonder about the language. I don't think my 4, 7 and 9 year old kids know what "flailing" means, together with a script and story that seemed a little beyond their reach. Having said that, they all sat and watched the film, happily eating their popcorn and apples and said they enjoyed it. So what do parents know?