Movie Thoughts: Back to the Outback (2021)

• Released: 10 December 2021
• Directed by: Harry Cripps, Clare Knight 
• Running time: 1 h 35 min
• Rating 3/5

Synopsis

A bunch of Australian animals deemed scary (accompanied by a koala) escape from their zoo and try to make their way to their families in the outback.

My Thoughts

I meant to review this when it came out but never ended up doing so. Until now. Shame on me. 

Overall this film was...fine. Nothing really all that much to say about it. It looks good, the voice acting's fine, the characters are pretty standard but do go through some arcs, and the message is pretty obvious but also good.

Maddie the taipan and her friends escape from the zoo and at first end up dragging the koala (ingenuously named Pretty Boy) with them. The zoos owner, a Steve Irwin-wannabe, goes after them to bring them back after being pressured into this by his son. From there on out it plays out pretty straightforward. The "scary" animals come together to help one another, Pretty Boy is at first reluctant but later becomes a part of the found family, the father reveals that he's not a cool outdoors-man to his son, a chase climax happens where all outback animals come to the aid of our heroes, etc. 

I do appreciate that rather than being a straightforward villain, Chaz is more so just misguided. He does serve the role as antagonist, but he's not a true villain, especially when he cares a lot about his son. And he does come around to realizing that the scary animals that escaped can be helpful friends as well. Plus, I appreciate that he does let them go in the end after realizing their worth. He could've easily still taken them home with him if he wanted to, but he lets them go to find their place in the outback. 

One point I do want to bring up is that the designs in this are a bit...mixed. Some really work (e.g. Pretty Boy's) but for the moral of scary/ugly animals not being so monstrous after all the designs of the main character gang (minus PB) all look really...tame. They either look really cartoon-y or just really cutesified. Which just goes a bit against the moral since even if the movie insists that most people see these animals as scary or hideous, the movie-watching audience just doesn't see that. They see a snake with huge anthro eyes, or a scorpion that's so stylized in a cartoon style that it hardly resembles the real thing anymore. I don't know, it just doesn't really work with they moral they're trying to tell. I'm not saying they should've had hyperrealistic CGI on any of our main characters, but to have them look a tiny bit more like the real deal wouldn't have hurt? Put the eyes of some of the animals on the sides of their head, don't give them faces that are this toon-y, etc. 

Other than that this is a perfectly fine serviceable movie. I just hope this movie doesn't teach any Australian kids that taipan snakes or scorpions are actually cute and fun to play with because that can only go so well.