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This plastic horror — horrifically, it’s a musical — is a head-smackingly dumb exercise in corporate filmmaking and mercenary marketing. So crass it makes me rethink my love of the toys themselves.
There’s magic here, and elemental spirits, but no magic and nothing elemental, metaphorically speaking. Rote and smaller than its predecessor. Even the songs are bland and forgettable.
An apparently unfairly maligned “wicked witch” has to be redeemed again. Anyway, bitches be evil, crazy and traumatized, or sweet dumb personality-free near-morons. You know, for kids!
Lovely animation and gentle, kid-pitched life lessons can’t quite overcome the familiar feel of this E.T. retread, nor the forced sense of wonder that is more convenient crutch than anything organic.
Painfully stupid faux-woke slapstick that wants to have its idiot male hero and its nods to feminism at the same time. Kids are listening, they are absorbing this garbage, and they deserve better. (now with a brief review of short “Hair Love”)
Raiders of the Lost Ark lite for kids, but juvenile humor and a derivative plot limit its appeal for adults. Teen Dora is really cool, though, and a great role model for girls and boys alike.
The series’ saving grace is that, with humor and heart so beautifully wise and stunningly rendered (CGI pun intended), even as returns diminish, a new chapter is still warm and smartly entertaining.
Underwhelming: episodic, a random collection of unconnected vignettes rather than one cohesive story. Inoffensive, but missing the first movie’s fantastical animals’ perspective on the human world.
The romance lacks chemistry, and the villain lacks bite. It seems embarrassed to be a musical, failing to embrace the necessary ineffable daydreaminess. Somehow even more cartoonish as live-action.
Pure rerun of A Dog’s Purpose: Pooch Bailey returns again and again (again) in different bodies to love and serve his humans. A sappy tail, pleasantly daydreamy. I’m not crying you’re crying.
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