- Released: 5 February
- Directed by: Leon Ding
- Running time: 1 h 30 min
- Rating 3.5/5
Synopsis
A trio consisting of a tourist guide and two anthropomorphic bears accidentally gets trapped in the prehistoric age and has to find a way to get back to the future.My Thoughts
Full disclaimer: I have legit no idea what that Boonie Bears are. I just know they have multiple movies but I haven't watched any. Either way, this movie crossed my Twitter this morning, and me, seeing it had neat-looking wolves in it, just had to watch it, of course. Let's dive right in.
Honestly, for what it is, I legit did not expect it to be any good. I mean, the wolf screencaps looked decent, but the rest had its problems. Even looking at the poster, none of the character designs really look that appealing. But what I found was a legit good movie. Not amazing or anything, but it had some real heart to it and I did not see that coming. I really expected this to be just your generic low-budget direct-to-DVD movie.
Let's first get the bad things out of the way: yes, most of the character designs are in fact not pleasant to look at, as mentioned before. The wolves look really good (as does Feifei, though she doesn't look the part in the poster) and there's some other character designs that are okay, but our main three (Bramble, Briar and the human Vick) really don't look all that appealing. Heck, Bramble and Briar literally share the exact same model, which just looks really cheap. Other characters, even background ones, have enough different models, so I really don't get why they had to keep Bramble and Briar the same sans skin colors.
There were also some problems regarding the lip sync. I know that this is a Chinese movie dubbed into English, but there were really some obvious parts were the mouth movement didn't match up with what was being said. It honestly didn't bother me as much in the less serious scenes, but it even happened in the dramatic ones, which is where it felt like it lessened the impact of some dialogue a bit.
That said, overall this was actually a good movie. I really didn't expect to like our main characters (Bramble in particular), but he develops a really great bond with Feifei, a little wolf pup that can't hunt. Their bond is legitimately the heart of the movie, and you do genuinely root so much for both of them, specially Feifei.
She's easily the best character out of the movie with the biggest arc. She goes from a cowardly wolf pup who literally got her brother, Hunter, accidentally killed at one point, to the one to defeat the villain in the end. It's just such a satisfying development to see her go through. I also liked how it turned out she'll be the one to start the process of dog domestication, as she is the first wolf to willingly stay with humans at the end of the movie.
Briar and Vick, the other two leads if you don't include Bramble and I guess Feifei, are decent characters too. I was worried we were going to get a really obnoxious love triangle with Vick, Lin and some rando caveman, but it was very downplayed and never got in the way. Briar has the least to do in this entire movie, being the comic relief. However, I didn't hate him, as I do generic kiddie comic relief a lot of the time.
The animation was also legitimately beautiful. Like, I did not expect it to look this good at all. It's not Pixar-quality, obviously, but it's so much better than I expected. Unfortunately not all of the models they have to work with look great, but for what we did have, it looked pretty darn great.
The villain, King, was also a real badass. He didn't have that much to him personality-wise, but his sheer presence just commanded such a respect and fear that honestly he didn't need to. It was also so satisfying to see him defeated by Feifei after he constantly put her down and hurt her all movie.
So, yeah, color me surprised. This movie with admittedly ugly main characters was legit well-animated, voice-acted and had a real heart to it. I may even watch it again in the future!
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