Animal Crackers
Directed by: Scott Christian Sava & Tony Bancroft
Produced by: Scott Christian Sava, George Lee, Marcus Englefield, Jamie Thomason, Leiming Guan, Jaime Maestro & Nathalie Martinez
Written by: Scott Christian Sava & Dean Lorey
Starring: John Krasinski, Emily Blunt, Ian McKellen, Danny DeVito, Sylvester Stallone, Raven-Symoné, Patrick Warburton, Wallace Shawn
Animal Crackers looked like a sure-fire hit. Good animation, interesting plot, outstanding characterization and a raft of great voice actors, including Danny DeVito, Wallace Shawn, and …Sylvester Stallone? Well, yes, Sylvester Stallone. He plays a character named ‘Bulletman” and all he says is “Bulletman,” with the overall affect of a lightly-brain-damaged Groot. Until he steals the show.
But it went into development hell, in part collateral damage from the Weinstein implosion. And went through two more studios, both of which also folded, until it became an orphan. That’s when Netflix, always looking for new animation, sauntered by, tripped over this movie, and said, “Hullo, wot’s this?”
Getting picked from a grim Dickensonian orphanage and enthroned in the biggest distributor in the world was quite a jump up, rags to riches, a Confederacy-of-Dunces type miracle. This movie deserves it.
It’s going to do well, likely to be a finalist in the Golden Globes and Oscars. It’s a delightful movie, saturated with wit, populated with memorable and interesting characters, and with a reasonably original plot.
There’s a traveling show, “Buffalo Bob’s Amazing Animal Circus” that features extraordinarily well-trained animals. Except they only look like animals: they are actually human performers who have eaten from a magical box of animal crackers that turns them into the animal the cookie they eat as shaped as. When they do eat such a cracker, a biscuit of them as their human form appears in the box, and they eat that to change back. All fine and good, so long as the human cookie doesn’t get lost or destroyed.
There’s a raft of baddies who interfere in all this, of course, including Ian McKellen, Wallace Shawn, Gilbert Gottfried (as McKellen’s non-henchman) and Patrick Warburton. Danny DeVito is in it as a clown who looks quite a bit like DeVito. That may sound like the stuff of nightmares—clowns are disturbing, DeVito is somewhat disturbing—but the result is a sympathetic, likable character. Krasinski and Blunt are the two main protagonists, and previously starred together in A Quiet Place, which, while a fine movie, doesn’t tell you much about how they will do as voice actors. As it is, they do quite well.
There is an interesting Chinese influence to the animation and character design, subtle, but a reminder that the country that is becoming the world leader in animation lent its considerable talents to this fine production.
It’s aimed at younger kids, but has enough going for it that it will appeal to adults.