Movie Thoughts: The Big Trip (2019)

 

• Released: April 12th, 2019
• Directed by: Vasiliy Rovenskiy, Natalya Nilova
• Running time: 1h 20min
• Rating 1.5/5

Synopsis

A tagtag group of animals has to return a lost baby panda to its home in China.

My Thoughts

This is another one of these movies that I've been putting off watching for years because it looks bad, but at the same time I do have a slight fascination for. Not all movies I watch are high art.

And yeah, despite giving this movie a fair chance (I didn't go in hoping I'd hate it), this is baaaad. This is really baaaaad. Maybe not the worst movie I've seen in recent years, but it's not good at all.

First of all, I'll just get this out of the way: This movie is obnoxious. Like, to a terrible degree. Especially the first thirty or so minutes when it's just Mic-Mic (the bear), Oscar (the hare), Duke (the pelican) and the baby panda. There's so many scenes of the panda crying, Duke talking an annoying amount, Oscar singing "La Cucaracha", Mic-Mic banging his head against things, and sometimes all four of these together. It's legitimately really obnoxious to sit through and there's just too much going on on-screen and audio wise. It's overstimulating. The movie does thankfully mellow out and become a bit less annoying after the thirty minute or so mark, but before that it's terribly annoying. The later two characters we meet, Janus the wolf and Amur the tiger, are thankfully not as annoying as the bear/hare/pelican trio.

Another thing is just that the animation does not look great. The textures are fine but some of the models look kinda off (Oscar is really bordering on that uncanny valley, for example), and there are just so many shots, particularly in the actions scenes, where the animation is not good or the "physics" straight up don't make any sense, even by cartoon logic. So visually this is just not a very nice movie to look at.

The rest is also just not very good. The characters (annoyance aside) are terribly generic and go exactly through the kinds of arcs you'd expect from them. Mic-Mic becomes friendlier and less grumpy. Janus learns to be brave. Oscar becomes friends with Mic-Mic. You get the gist. And, like I said above, I just do not like Mic-Mic and Oscar and Duke as characters. Partially because they're so annoying, but also because they're so generic and uninspired. Janus I liked a little more because he is a wolf and not annoying, and Amur is honestly just fine. He doesn't have much of an arc but he's not obnoxious and can be mildly entertaining because he likes poetry. 

I also have to bring up how there's like almost no female characters in this movie. I don't need there to be a perfect 50/50 male/female character balance in every movie I watch, but at least some female side characters would be nice? I believe that aside from one, maybe two small characters the entire cast of this movie is male. And spoilers, this barely improves in the sequels.

Overall this movie just sucked, particularly the first thirty minutes. It's just not pleasant at all to watch and horribly annoying for a lot of it. Even the latter half which isn't as terrible just still isn't good. Skip this one.