Movie Log: Barnyard

I gave the boys a choice this weekend: I said that we'd go see something in the theater for Boys Movie Saturday (a tradition I recommend to anyone who has kids all day only one or two days a week), and they could pick Monster House (which I was hoping for; it looks like the best of the current crop), The Ant Bully (which they were all excited about a week ago) or Barnyard.

As you might have guessed, they picked Barnyard.

Since my mother always told me to be positive, we'll start with the good points:

• It's vocally well-cast; the biggest roles are played by people like Kevin James and Sam Elliott. No major celebrities, no stunt casting, no one's name above the title; just actors chosen because they're right for the part. That's actually refreshing in an animated movie these days, when even Pixar is trotting out a tarted-up Paul Newman vehicle. (And I saw some great voice-over names in the credits, like Rob Paulsen and Maurice LaMarche, which I also like to see: those people are just better at this than random movie actors are.)
• The backgrounds are gorgeous, and generally very realistic, while the character designs are more stylized in an interesting way. The characters do look a bit plastic-y, but it seems to be intentional. And the hyper-detailed background combined with cartoony foreground figures style has been very successful for a whole lot of cartoonists and animators over the years. The human characters in particular are amazingly grotesque, in a Jimmy Neutron-esque way, but it works.
  
• And it's not very long.

OK, now that I've got that out of the way, I can get to the meat of it: the story sucks. It's incredibly derivative, completely predictable, and often stupid. Several times the movie turns into an idiot plot (as when our hero the cow goes off to fight a pack of coyotes on his own instead of organizing a team of other animals because...well, I think it's just because that's what always happens in dumb movies like this). So it's a nice-looking stretch of celluloid that's impossible to believe in or take seriously as a movie. Nice pictures, though.

I can't recommend that anyone see this movie unless your kids are dragging you to it. But, if they do, try not to spend too much time thinking about the story; just listen to the soothing sound of Sam Elliott's voice and look at the very pretty pictures.