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Reviews
The Ice Age Adventures of Buck Wild (2022)
It should've been so much better.
This originated as a planned spin-off mini-series featuring Buck, Crash, and Eddie. When Disney bought Fox, they shut down Blue Sky, but maintained that the spin-off was still going to happen. Seems like it should've been great; they own the rights to the original assets due to the acquisition, and Disney has the money AND talent to turn out great products.
However, Disney had other plans. The mini-series got retooled into a one-off movie, the animation work was given to a studio whose biggest CGI credits are Diary of a Wimpy Kid and Happily N'Ever After, and only ONE voice actor reprised his role (Simon Pegg as Buck). The models are terrible (for some reason, they decided NOT to use the original assets), the animation is slow and choppy, there are periods in the film where the frame rate just drops out for no reason, the plot is muddled and lackluster at best, and the story (and production) just feels insanely rushed.
Several of the characters from the franchise also didn't even make an appearance or even get mentioned, as if they didn't exist. Peaches, Julian, Louis, Shira, and Scrat were all MIA. And now, Disney has given up ownership of Scrat, so don't expect to see him again, either. The characters that did return, ignoring their awful voicing, just felt like shells of their former selves; and the new characters just felt cheap and unnecessary.
This COULD'VE and SHOULD'VE been a good property, but Disney cheaped out and rushed a product to market that no one will enjoy. It's pretty bad when they ruin the three characters I enjoyed the most out of the franchise.
Hodge Saves Easter (2020)
FaceRig: The Movie
This is, by far, the worst animated "movie" I've ever seen, and I struggle to even call it a "movie". At an hour long, it meets the time qualification to be considered a movie, but that's where it stops. The entire runtime consists of characters in a static pose, talking. Constantly. Endlessly. Ceaselessly talking. Each character has maybe three or four animations of their arms moving in some way, and some sort of scoot/sidestep animation, and they're repeated constantly. One of the characters literally sidesteps every few seconds he's on screen. There's also no attempt at lip-syncing. The dead-eyed stares and rudimentary mouth movements on the absolutely hideous character models make it look like it was animated in an early version of FaceRig, that program that attempts to motion-capture your webcam footage and overlays a 3D model on top of it. There's a "plot", I guess, but it's so inane and pointless. Between the constant chatter and lack of any visual stimulation, my brain basically shut down trying to get through this. If I had to give this a single-word review, it would be this: Insufferable. Save your sanity and don't watch this travesty of a "movie".