Wonder Park

Voices of: Jennifer Garner, Matthew Broderick, John Oliver, Mila Kunis, Kenan Thompson, Brianna Denski, Ken Jeong, Sofia Mali
Directed by: Dylan Brown (uncredited)
Rating: PG
Genre: Animated, Adventure, Comedy
2019

Times Seen:
Tim: 1

Summary: A girl is shocked to discover the amusement park she created in her mind is actually real.

Review:

Tim: It's been a long time since I watched an animated movie as terrible as Wonder Park. It's almost bafflingly bad. It feels like an early, early draft of an animated movie skipped twelve rewrites and just got made in its terrible, underdeveloped state. This is a true story- I felt asleep on the couch watching it with my family, snoring and all. I think I missed about ten minutes of the film. I finished it, then had to go back and watch the chunk of time I missed (my family wasn't impressed, including my four year-old son). This is a really bad movie.

It felt like Wonder Park tried to copy Pixar but had no idea how to do it. The central story is about a girl who struggles to cope with her mom being seriously ill. Pixar has mastered the art of telling heartfelt stories that touch on real emotion. Here, it feels completely manipulative. It felt like the reason the mom got sick was to tug at the heartstrings of the audience. Now, it's completely plausible that none of that is true- that the writers really wanted to tell an emotional story for the sake of the story, to give kids with sick parents a way to process their emotions while watching this film. That could all be true, but that's certainly not the perception I got from watching this movie. It takes real skill to handle emotional stories like this involving children and this film botched that. It made me dislike the movie even more.

I also found it bizarre to see how the animal characters were portrayed here. It felt like an absolute miss. I'm kind of laughing as I tried to remember these completely forgettable characters. There was a monkey that was kind of cool, but he didn't get a lot of screen time. I have absolutely no idea what his name was. There was (I think) a warthog voiced by Mila Kunis. She was kind of mean, but eventually nice? There was a big blue bear. And then there were a number of other small woodland creatures. Truthfully, not a single character was actually compelling. I just think about all the good animated movies out there and how they established interesting, exciting characters that you grow to love. You know them and they become iconic- Woody, Buzz, Lightning McQueen, Shrek, Toothless, even the Minions, for god's sake (although I hate those movies). They're all characters that are memorable. Hell, even the Boss Baby was more memorable (although that movie was even worse than this one). This movie has none of them. It's the most bland collection of faceless, nameless, worthless characters I've seen in an animated movie in a long time.

The animation was fine- it was full of bright colors and there was some majesty to the large Wonder Park. I don't think I was ever truly wowed, but I didn't have any complaints with the visual depiction of this world. It's telling that the technology has advanced so much that a film like this can look beautiful. Sadly, the issues here are with the script and the direction.

I mostly just feel bad for the voice cast, as they all gave fairly good performances. Jennifer Garner was solid as the mom and Matthew Broderick did really good work as the dad. Mila Kunis has a great, distinct voice, but it never seemed believable coming from the warthog or whatever she was. John Oliver did a good job, but his character (a porcupine maybe?) didn't do nearly enough. As a whole, the voice cast was fine- again, they weren't responsible for the mess of this film.

I have to heap so much of the blame for this on Dylan Brown, who bizarrely is uncredited as director. When I looked it up, it was because of multiple complaints of "inappropriate and unwanted behavior". So, not only is the guy a total scumbag, he also directed a generic, awful animated film. I certainly hope I never hear from him again. I really hope Paramount Animation throws in the towel as well. I always forget they exist and I doubt they'll ever be another Disney, Pixar, Dreamworks Animation, or even Illumination (which is bad, too). Wonder Park is completely devoid of any sense of wonder- it's a bad, bad movie.

Rating 1-10
Tim's Rating: 4



If You Enjoyed This Movie, We Recommend: Sherlock Gnomes