Movie Thoughts: Oink (2022)

• Released: February 10, 2022
  
• Directed by: Mascha Halberstad
• Running time: 1h 12min
• Rating 2/5

Synopsis

A girl named Babs adopts a piglet, whom she names Oink. But her family threatens to get rid of the pig if he cannot behave. Worse yet, her grandfather turns out to be a butcher who wants to fatten the pig and then turn him into sausages. Babs and her brother Tijn will have to work together to save the piglet.

My Thoughts

Yet another movie I watched on my quest to see more Dutch films. I wasn't particularly looking forward to this one (the trailer looked...bad) but it's...kinda bad. I guess. But not the worst movie I've ever seen.

The first thing that really put me off was the style it has going on. It just doesn't really work for me. with the weird and somewhat uncanny looking stop motion puppets with their odd stick-on mouths. Stop motion can genuinely look great, but not like this. I was constantly distracted with just how ugly this movie looked. Oink himself looks fine, but pretty much all human characters just look kinda disgusting and uncanny. Their mouths look weird, their eyes are tiny and super far apart and not very expressive, the movements are often unnatural, it just doesn't really work. I get that this is the first Dutch stop motion movie ever made, but the visuals just do not look appealing at all.

What does work about the movie is the story. Well, mostly, anyways. It's a story about dealing with difficult family members and the love this girl has for this pig. There's also some themes about vegetarianism/veganism thrown in and while it's all pretty simple the story overall is handled pretty competently. 

However, the characters I feel kind of mixed about. Honestly the most interesting character in this isn't Babs or Oink or even the grandfather, but rather Babs' mother. She's the one who has a difficult past with her father, she's the one who has to figure out how to keep her family together while having to accept that her father is suddenly back in her life, she is the one who keeps changing how she feels about him.

Meanwhile Babs is just...kind of there. She does have a personality, but I'd be lying if I said she had a real arc going on, other than changing how she feels about her grandfather once she finds out he's a butcher. But like...she has one "want" in this story (keeping her pig) and she gets that in the end, but she doesn't really change much as a character over the course of a story. Which is okay, I guess, not every character has to have an arc, but as a main character it makes her pretty bland and boring. Her main personality trait is that she really loves animals and that's still exactly the same by the end of the movie. Other than that she's not a very interesting or dynamic character.

Oink himself is honestly ever less of a character. I'd even really hesitate to call him one. He's more so just an element to drive the plot forward. But personality-wise he has nothing to him. He's just there to be cute and shit and fart a lot. As a title character I feel they should've done a little more with Oink rather than just having him be something to drive the plot. Give him an actual personality and have him play a more proactive role in the story.

Oh yeah, before I forget, another thing that made this movie rather bad for me is it's absolute devotion to shit and fart humor it has. I've over course seen my fair share of family/children's films with potty and gross-out humor throughout the years. A lot of movies for this target audience (sadly) feel the need to include at least one or a few fart or poo jokes. But Oink, this movie absolutely obsessed with it, to the point it's coming across as fetishistic. There are entire extended scenes of the pig farting and shitting itself and all over people and there's even scenes where his shit is being made into food and almost eaten by people. Seriously, I do not recommend watching this film while eating because it's genuinely gross.

If it didn't include so much gross-out and didn't look so unappealing, this would honestly just be a generic but serviceable-enough children's film. But it does look unappealing, and there is so much shit and fart humor it genuinely becomes uncomfortable and feels like the creators of this film had a fetish for it going on. So ultimately I do not recommend this movie. There are elements of a good movie in here, but it's buried beneath unappealing visuals, a generic story, and shit. Lots and lots of shit.