- Released: May 9 2017
- Directed by: Tim Maltby
- Running time: 44 min
- Rating 0.5/5
Synopsis
The wolf pups travel to Bear Kingdom where they hope to stop the devious plan of those wishing to take over.
My Thoughts
This review is definitely closing a chapter in my reviewing time, as one of the first things I actually reviewed back in 2014 was the Alpha and Omega sequels as they were coming out. I obviously stopped halfway and deleted my old reviews, but it was still fun to come back to and just check out how utterly bizarre and bad these things get at times. So, let’s dive into the final movie of this series (pray to the gods that there’ll be no more after this one).
I am still just baffled at how much these sequels can divert from the original at this point. With there being little to no continuity between each one and the first movie, it just feels all over the place. It’s been established in pretty much all of the earlier movies that:
Adult bears don’t talk to the wolves
The bears don’t have some kind of kingdom or society, they just kinda roam around and do their own thing
Yet still this movie exists, where they can talk (though, granted, that happened in the last movie, too) and now suddenly are all governed by a royal family? It just feels weird as fuck and throws a lot of previous continuity out the window. But it’s an Alpha and Omega sequel. I shouldn’t be surprised at this point. What about the rest of the story?
Well, it’s very basic. Just your “save the day”-plot. As is to be expected, very low stakes, the pups disobey their parents, we get introduced to some new characters that do barely a thing in the overall movie and it’s just your good vs. evil plot. Nothing complex. But, as far as these sequels go, it doesn’t have the worst plot out of all of them. The very worst I’ve seen is still fucking Dino Digs, with Family Vacation being a close second. Despite how this movies’ continuity makes very little sense and has barely a connection to the previous ones, it’s not too horrible. Just lazily written.
The animation is, again, bad. I know this is a repeating factor in the A&O sequels, but it’s still the case here. Something I didn’t point out in the previous one is that, as of The Big Fur-eeze, Runt has longer hair for some reason. Why? No clue. Maybe it is to distinguish him more from Stinky, but shouldn’t their size, voice and his brighter colors do that already? Ah well, as for the animation itself, it’s still sloppy and incredibly cheap, but, again, not as bad as the worst offenders in this series. Just very bland, rough and uninteresting to look at. I spotted some animation mistakes again (one of which is even in the screenshots I’m using for this review. See if you can spot it?) and it’s just not good-looking in the slightest, even for a TV special or something.
As for the rest of the visuals, it’s still sloppy as well. Very little attention to colors for each scene, unpolished backgrounds, the new characters models don’t do anything for me… Not an improvement over the last one.
I’m having a hard time whether or not this one was paced better than Fur-eeze. I feel like, much like that one, it didn’t have as much padding, but then again there’s still scenes that just don’t really have anything to do with the story. Marcel and Paddy start to fall for this magpie character who really adds nothing, and the many side characters (Agnes, Brent, Fleet, the squirrels, the lady reindeer) barely have a point.
Speaking of the characters, this movie again had something that bothered me in many of the others, though not the seventh one: too many characters. We have our leads, of course: the pups and Kate and Humphrey. Then there’s Marcel, Paddy, Eve, Winston, Agnes, Brent, Fleet and the other side characters on the side of good from the forest. Then there’s the rogue wolf and his henchmen, the bear royal family (consisting of the King, Queen and princess Canue), the magpie, Strom (main bear villain), Claw, Evin and Louis. It’s just too many characters with too much going on for a film like this, especially one that has a running time of only 44 minutes. A lot of these could’ve been simplified or simply written out altogether and you’d have a shorter but probably more coherent movie that doesn’t jump all over the place with so many different characters. As for how they are written, how are the characters? Boring. They all fit into either “good” or “evil”. The pups still only have their basic traits that define them, Kate and Humphrey are as bland as they’ve always been in these sequels. All of these new side characters do nothing for me. The bad guys are just villains because evil. Canue is a perfect character with no flaw whatsoever. Queen and King Bear are uninteresting as sin. So, yeah, the conclusion with the characters is: too many, too boring.
Going back to just how confusing this movie can be for a minute, can we just talk about the main wolf villain of this movie? His name is, get this, King Rogue. Not King from some of the earlier sequels. King Rogue. The problem with this? Aside from this one being a different character with a different voice actor, he looks like this. AKA, identical to King of the previous movies. And, no, it is confirmed that they are different characters, despite them looking exactly the same and both being kings of a pack of rogues at one point. The main things setting them apart are the difference in voice actor and slightly different name (like previously mentioned), but also their packs. King Rogue still has a group of subordinates in this movie, whereas King (just King) lost his in movie 2 and only had a few allies left by the time of The Big Fur-eeze. Still, this is absolutely confusing as hell, as well as utterly lazy. They didn’t even bother giving him a re-skin or slightly different markings, he’s just exactly the same model and nearly the same name, as well as having the same role as Just King at first by being the leader of a rogue pack. Would it literally have taken that much effort to come up with a different name and use a different model or at the very least the same model with a different coat color? Apparently so. King Rogue sucks. Also, another weird inconsistency I’ve noted that’s completely separate from anything else but still bothers me: Canue has human-like hair (like the wolf models). Literally none of the other bears have this, including her parents. She’s the only bear across all of these movies that has this, and it bothers me a lot. They, again, could’ve easily made her look different from Brent by just re-skinning her.
Finally, for the music, I’d say that it was passable. I recognized very little re-used soundtracks in this, so at least we got some unique scores for this one. I was getting really sick of the same ones of movie One being re-used across seven sequels.
I definitely know that this one is worse than The Big Fureeze, which I was willing to cut some slack for at least being slightly less painful than these other sequels. But, as much worse as this one is, I’m not angry at it anymore. I’m over being mad at these sequels, I just feel a disdain for them. But, hey, I’ve done it. I’ve reviewed every single Alpha and Omega sequel. As for this movie, it had a plot that barely tried, many confusing inconsistencies and weird tidbits in comparison to the previous films, way too many characters that were all over the place, bad animation and lacking visuals, though the soundtrack was okay.
I guess I can finally move on to reviewing different movies now. Thanks for sticking with me, those that did. I’ll try not to look back on these movies and move on from hereon forth. As bad as these movies were, I had fun reviewing them, and it’s definitely interesting to see what doesn’t work. See ya in the next one!
Also an interesting note about this one: I’m having a really hard time finding a lot about it. The other sequels have tons of screenshots and information floating around on this, but this one seems oddly forgotten. It’s not even at Letterboxd.
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