 One critic after the other is describing The Wild as a virtual remake of Madagascar, although the movie was well into production when Madagascar was released. (Since such films usually attempt to teach kids certain moral lessons, Ty Burr observes in the Boston Globe, the lesson they may take away from this movie is, "The early bird gets the box-office returns.") Jeannette Catsoulis in the New York Times says that what lifts the latest movie above its predecessor is some splendid computer animation. "The Wild is filled with softness and texture," she writes. "When a breeze stirs the coat of Samson the lion, the hairs lift and separate just like the real thing." But being so much like the real thing apparently put off Chicago Sun-Times critic Roger Ebert, who writes, "I thought the movie's lip-synching was too good. The mouths of the characters move so precisely in time with their words that the cartoon illusion is lost, and we venture toward the Uncanny Valley -- that shadowy area known to robot designers and animators, in which artificial creatures so closely resemble humans that they make us feel kinda creepy. Lip-synching in animation usually ranges from bad to perfunctory to fairly good, and I think fairly good is as good as it should get." Some critics, however, suggest that even "fairly good" may be too good a description for The Wild. Carey Rickey writes in the Philadelphia Inquirer: "I liked The Wild better when it was called Madagascar -- and I didn't like Madagascar that much." And Kyle Smith's review in the New York Post is headlined "Badagascar." |
