Too Bad animated film review by Pierre Perifel [Anteprima]

Too bad movie review by Pierre Perifel with the Italian voices of Andrea Perroni, Edoardo Ferrario, Valerio Lundini, Margaret Vicar, Saverio Raimondo

Broadly speaking, animated films for families can be divided into two macro-groups: in one we find those who want to reconcile the involvement of an audience made up of both very young and adults; in the other, instead, all those films that seek the attention of the little ones take place. Neither is the right or wrong way to approach image communication, but it is still important to recognize these ambivalent lines of thought.

The emblematic cases of the first group are the films Pixar, capable of speaking to a vast audience through arguments and staging functional to the identification of a large number of spectators, not disdaining even daring choices, which may not meet the consent of the little ones. But even the signed films have been an example of this for several years Dreamworks Animation, often more unruly and mature than their Disney counterpart. A few names of the “origins” are enough to give an idea: The Prince of Egypt, The road to El Dorado, Shrek. Films like these could be enjoyed, for the most part, by children of different ages, but there were a number of subtexts, double meanings and subtleties that only an adult audience could detect.

From the first period, marked by the direction of Jeffrey Katzenberg (mind that, before founding Dreamworks with Spielberg And Geffenhad reported the Disney on the wave of success in the nineties: the so-called “Renaissance”), we went through a more direct encounter between “children and parents”, with films such as Kung Fu Panda And How to Train Your Dragonup to the acquisition by Universal in 2016. In recent years, Dreamworks seems to have taken the opposite path compared to the first works, seeking more and more an audience of young people. The most recent of their feature films, Too baddirected by Pierre Perifel with Sam Rockwell, Craig Robinson, Anthony Ramos, Awkwafina and the Italian voices of Andrea Perroni, Valerio Lundini And Francesco De Carlo it is proof of that.

The film follows the events of the Too bad, a gang of criminals who carry out their misdeeds in a city where people and anthropomorphic animals live together in serenity. Gang members are Snake (a grumpy snake burglar), Shark (a formidable shark in the art of disguise), Webs or Miss Tarantula (a hacker tarantula capable of penetrating any security system), Piranha (an easily irritable piranha who never disdains a fight). These are captained by Wolfa very proficient cheating wolf with words (a kind of Danny Ocean, but with the hair). Due to some “complications” (which we will not reveal) the group of super-criminals find themselves having to go straight, trying to go from “too bad” to “too good”. This change in behavior, however, will create disagreements within the gang, stuck on the edge between what is right and what is wrong.

This, broadly speaking, is what the film is about. A simple story, overused and easily predictable from the very first minutes, but certainly capable of entertaining the little ones. Precisely in this aspect we find that passage from the first to the second set mentioned above. The target audience is immediately evident and the film does not worry too much about the effectiveness of certain narrative choices. However, we cannot close both eyes just because the film has no intention of relating to an adult audience (consisting mainly of parents accompanying their children to the theater). The banality of situations and resolutions makes itself felt several times, also because the film (especially in the second half) is full of “twists” that mimic a narrative tradition of a spy / detective genre that, even if it does not is inveterate lovers of cinematographic language, they are all too familiar.

From a technical point of view, the film follows that line of mixing between 2D and 3D animation that is now depopulated within the industry. Despite Too bad born as graphic novel (created by the Australian Aaron Blabey), Dreamworks he has chosen to detach himself from the very particular (and also quite disturbing) comics origin to direct himself, as often happens in these cases, on a more “fascinating” front (especially for the merchandise market). This, however, led to an anonymization of the characters, lacking in character and iconicity. It seems to have known them forever, which is both good and bad. The same goes for environments, in which memory struggles between an identification with Los Angeles and one with countless other relatively recent animated films such as, for example, the series of Despicable Me. Basically, at the end of the screening there is no visual element that is capable of iconically synthesizing the film, a result that a product that focuses entirely on its own image certainly does not want to achieve.