The school holidays beckon. Children's films Rio and Hop beckon likewise. One of them is worth your time.
Rio
Parents around the country will shortly be faced with a decision. School holidays: shorter days: colder weather. Which children’s movie should we take them to?
Mars Needs Moms will be opening just as most schools close, if you’re of a mind to see one of the most reviled and mocked films of the year to date. I am. But I haven’t yet. To Justin Bieber: Never Say Never, I’m afraid I can only bring myself to give the obvious retort: never. You’re on your own with this one. Opening this week, however, we have Hop, in which a runaway Easter bunny finds common ground with a young American boomerang kid (they can neither of them please their Dads), and Rio, in which an over-domesticated pet macaw has to woo a wild-living female if his endangered species is to survive. I am pleased to report that these two films represent a very clear choice.
Take your kids to Rio. The Rio de Janeiro tourism board must be over the moon about how often this phrase will be used this month, and so they should be: the city’s presentation here makes one of the best arguments to date for 3D animation. Taking a lesson from last year’s How To Train Your Dragon – “You want 3D wow-factor, tell a story about flying things” – the film leaps into the air with its avian cast, and swoops, and soars, and dives, and then sits still, looking down from high places. These pauses tend to be full of dialogue: happily, clever, story-advancing dialogue, voiced by Jesse Eisenberg and Anne Hathaway, as the mismatched macaws, and, drum roll, Jemaine Clement, as an evil Australian cockatoo in cahoots with bird smugglers. (He couldn’t be an evil New Zealand falcon? Sigh…)
There are musical numbers: they work. There’s romance: it’s well judged, both for its primary audience and for adults. The story is well conceived, the humorous supporting characters are actually humorous, and the inevitable Big Climax Involving Carnival (“You arrived just at the right time of year!”) is cleverly integrated into the plot, not grafted on by directorial fiat. The voice acting is top drawer, especially Eisenberg’s – nasal, nervous and nice, he’s perfectly type-cast as a Nerd Bird – and Clement’s. The one caveat, in fact, is that Clement is sufficiently sinister that very small children may be terrified. Some appeared to be, at the screening I went to. They recovered quickly.
So: take your kids to Rio. And (here’s something I haven’t been moved to say very often in the past year), if you can manage it, take them to a 3D screening. It’s a fun film either way, but in 3D it’s quite a lot better.
Do not take your kids to Hop. Do not take yourself. If you see someone about to buy a ticket, fling yourself in their path and tell them their dentist can supply an equivalent dose of pain far more efficiently. It would make me very happy if this film failed to make any money at all, because the odds of our seeing another like it in a year’s time would then go down. Very slightly. Any cynicism you may harbour about Hollywood’s capacity to nurture and reward mediocrity will find its justifying examples here, but please don’t put that statement to the test. Ignore the thing. It will go away.
Details: Russell Brand voices E.B., a sweet little bunny with the conscience and social skills of Genghis Khan. (Russell Brand’s brand has been built on the backs of irritating, self-centered, manipulative child-men. He’s a hilarious supporting actor in the right film, but who on earth decided he should play lead roles?) (Coming soon: he takes a run at the Dudley Moore part in the Arthur remake. He’ll be fine up to the point where we’re meant to start liking him, which as I recall was about five minutes in). E.B. does not want to fulfil his father’s dreams by becoming the Easter Bunny. He wants to be a drummer. He runs away to Hollywood, where he serves as the fulcrum for gags I’d love to have to unpack for a perplexed seven year old. “Daddy, why did the rabbit go to the Playboy Mansion?” “Because they have bunnies there, son. I’ll tell you more in five years, when you’re old enough to find this film as tedious as I do”. “Daddy, why did the rabbit stroke that woman’s hair?” “Because inappropriate cross-species sexual humour is always a big draw in children’s movies, son. If I say any more right now some other parent will hit me”. “Daddy, who is David Hasselhoff and why is he making talking car jokes?” “Hey, son, if we leave now we can make that screening of Rio next door. It’s in 3D!”
E.B. meets Fred, a smugly under-motivated guy in his late twenties who can’t understand why his family wish he’d leave home. Fred is played by James Marsden, who thus far in his career has been just what a film needed precisely once: in Enchanted, where he was required to play a one-dimensional cartoon character. Fred, via some plot mechanics too random to detail, moves into a mansion when his family kick him out, hits E.B. with his car, does the “OMG! A talking rabbit!” thing, and spends the rest of the story succumbing to E.B.’s various guilt trips, taking him places, finding him drumming gigs, and having his life complicated, oh so hilariously, by the presence of someone even more self-oblivious than he is. Personal growth is presumed by the film to occur, though we never see signs of it, possibly because it exceeds Marsden’s range and is expressly forbidden by Brand’s contract.
There are problems with the animation. Putting a cartoon in the same space as a human actor was cracked 23 years ago, as it happens in a film that also starred a rabbit; Hop didn’t get the memo. There are supporting characters who approach the problematic, such as Fred’s adopted Asian sister, whose sole function in the film is to take her own perfection for granted and then fail at things, in ways that I’m sure play to no existing middle-American prejudices whatsoever. There’s a whole tiresome list of things that don’t really work, but the core problem with the film is simply that it’s not engaging, it’s not moving, and it’s very, very far from funny. I believe I laughed spontaneously once, when Fred was attacked by a large dog. If the dog had gone for E.B. instead, I’d have laughed longer.