You may be wondering why I haven’t posted anything on here in about six weeks. Did I fall off the face of the Earth, or more likely, into a deep depression? Did I run out of money entirely, making it impossible to live day-to-day, to say nothing of going to the movies? Did I finally get arrested for calling Donald Trump a Nazi rapist (which he is)? Thankfully, the answer to all of these is no.
The fact of the matter is, I’ve just been exceedingly busy. That’s not much of an excuse on its face, but there’s more to it than just having stuff on my proverbial plate. First off, I finally got a TV gig again – two in a row, in fact. The first was writing for a new game show that will debut in January (can’t say more than that for now), and the second was for a pilot that was filmed over the weekend. Both projects were for the same company, based in Australia, which made for some extra time management variables. I stayed local in Los Angeles, but my bosses were sometimes here, sometimes in Sydney, and sometimes in Lisbon for the actual shoots, and that required a bit of juggling when it came to on-the-clock hours and sleep schedules. Still, it was my first career work in close to two years, so I was more than grateful.
Second, with June comes two of the major film festivals I help cover for my friends at No Rest for the Weekend: the Brooklyn Film Festival and Tribeca. My duties were scaled back by necessity this time around, but I still had to devote a few weekends to online screeners and writing reviews for them. Both were fun as always, but that was another chunk of time gone.
Third, and most crucial to this particular equation, is YouTube. You may notice that I haven’t posted any videos since the Oscar Blitz, but that doesn’t mean I haven’t been working on content. In fact, I put the pedal to the metal on a project I’ve been toying around with for YEARS, aggressively devoting most of my free time to getting it finished at long last, in time for the channel’s fifth anniversary on July 5. I completed it yesterday, and it currently sits in YT Jail because of multiple copyright claims. I had anticipated this possibility, so that’s why I put a lot on the back burner to make sure I had enough lead time to make sure the piece cleared before the scheduled premiere date. I lost count of how many hours I put into this, but suffice to say, it was a lot, and it took up most of my downtime over the last two months. Hopefully the red tape clears soon, so that I can giddily share it with you all.
All of this means that I had almost no time to see new films, and even less mental bandwidth to write critiques in this space. It was a sacrifice I had to make, and I’m sure I frustrated a few of you along the way. If it’s any consolation, the reviews for Animal Farm and The Sheep Detectives were during this onslaught, so I did at least make an effort to keep all the plates spinning. After a few weeks, though, I realized I had to let something fall by the wayside, and with my self-imposed deadline on the video, the only option was the blog. I’m sorry I was away for so long.
That said, I did still see a few flicks here and there, enough that I have a bit of a backlog that I’ll be clearing over the next few days. The first and largest chunk will be dispensed with right now. If you’re a regular, you know of my annual quixotic attempt to clear the eligibility list for the Animated Feature Oscar, which I always come up just short on each time. Well, I paid attention to the release calendar, both for major titles and indies that likely would only get a one-week qualifying run, and I carved out some time to see them along with some mainstream tentpole features.
As I went, I noticed a theme: There are a LOT of cartoons with animal protagonists this year. That shouldn’t sound too surprising. A lot of animated films are geared towards children, and what better way to sell them than with cute talking creatures? But for some reason, this year it feels particularly glaring. I’ve seen nine potential entries in 2026, and so far only three don’t prominently feature various critters. That leaves six others that do. I’ve already covered two of them (Animal Farm and Hoppers), so in the interest of efficiency, I’ll take care of the other four tonight, mostly because only one would warrant a full review based on its hype and theatrical run, but that was back in February (I watched it on Netflix a couple weeks ago instead), so it would be odd to give it a lengthy post now.
Again, I’m truly sorry that I had to deprioritize this blog, but hopefully it’ll all have been worth it in the long run. I’m not out of the woods yet financially, and it could turn out that this video that I’ve spent so much time on never sees the light of day, which will make me ever so pissed, but it was a risk I had to take. Hopefully, at least, I can return to a bit of normalcy and keep the content flowing here as it should. For now, though, enjoy four mini-reviews of cartoon animals!
Decorado
A Spanish-Portuguese collaboration by director Alberto Vázquez, adapting his own award-winning short into a full feature, Decorado is a dark yet funny look at the hopelessness we all feel as our world becomes more dystopian and Orwellian. The simple pretext of a Wachowski-style illusory life for anthropomorphic animals ends up becoming an eye-catching visual metaphor, with a healthy dose of laughs to balance out the more morose reminders of our reality.
A literal curtain opens on a town called Anywhere, home to several animal characters, most notably (for our purposes), a married mouse couple, Arnold (Asier Hormaza) and Maria (Aintzane Gamiz). They’ve been together for a long time, a domestic life once filled with excitement and romance, but which has since grown stale, as Arnold has been out of work for years. The town is run by the ALMA corporation (literally the Almighty Limitless Megacorporative Agency), for which Arnold and Maria used to work before they were fired for a mild act of youthful rebellion. The company basically employs the entire town and operates all the utilities, so they control whether or not Arnold can ever work again, and they also own the debt the pair have on their house. Maria gets occasional freelance work as a comic strip cartoonist, but it’s not nearly enough to get by. Arnold is looked down upon by the community, who treat him like a deadbeat loser, but there are influences that are clearly against him, illustrated by a bleakly hilarious early gag where he hunts for a job, but the local shops all have signs in the window that specifically eliminate him from consideration, including disqualifying him for his age, species, and the type of clothes he wears. The capper is a devastating – but still hysterical – sign that just reads, “Go home, Arnold.”
After spending some time with his layabout friends, a rat named Ramiro (Ander Vildósola) and a chicken called Crazy (Raúl Dans; that the filmmakers didn’t call him “El Pollo Loco” for a lucrative cash-in feels like a missed opportunity for ironic commentary), Arnold becomes convinced that he’s living in what amounts to a simulation, the titular “Decorado” referring to stage props and set pieces in the massive pantomime in which he’s trapped. Ramiro says he knows a way out of their enclave, but while traversing the off-limits woods, he’s killed by a giant owl, later to return as a ghost, and Crazy is arrested for starting fires, which the militarized police actually set to give themselves emergency martial powers. Arnold resolves to find a way out, including stopping taking the medication he’s been given by ALMA to keep him “normal.” Meanwhile, Maria becomes more and more despondent, doubting her skills, losing her love for Arnold, being aggressively pursued by the fake macho ALMA executive Gregory (Iñaki Beraetxe), and getting taunted by the closest thing to a human in this picture, a fairy literally named Depression (Aintzane Crujeiras).
The art style is deceptively effective here, with the 2D animation feeling like something out of a children’s cartoon, only we’re very much NOT dealing with juvenile themes. Hell, there’s a mermaid with a human bottom half who gets fucked by a literal demon at one point, and there are talking mushrooms who sell drugs. A kiddie flick this is not (even though it was distributed domestically by GKIDS). But the designs do draw you in, lulling you into a false sense of, not so much security, but reasonability that the plot will quickly belie. No better is this illustrated than in Ramiro’s overly cutesy ghost form, and in the appearance of Pato Roni (Vázquez himself), a Donald Duck caricature who alternately lives on the streets as a drug addict and serves as a rapacious real estate agent quick to seize the opportunity for a tidy profit and commission if he gets to evict Arnold and Maria and sell their house.
All of this works to further the uncomfortable feeling that something just isn’t right here. Taking cues from the likes of Nineteen Eighty-Four, The Truman Show, and The Matrix (among others), the messaging can get a bit muddied at times, as at one point the enemy is clearly the all-controlling ALMA, while at others it’s purely our own anxieties. There’s an odd poignance to the fact that Arnold’s “happy” life was as a functionary in an ALMA factory, inspecting coat hangers for quality and simply loving Maria as a passionate youth would. When the story is focused on this idea that it doesn’t take much to keep people “on track” and basically docile, yet so many powerful entities decide to make them miserable instead, the film is insightful and borderline magical. When we’re blurring the lines between cartoons and the reality of this world for the sake of a shocking joke, it doesn’t hit quite as hard.
Still, this is one of the more unique films I’ve seen so far this year, and it unintentionally triggered a bit of nostalgia, which oddly can tie in to the premise of societal placebos. One of my favorite video games growing up was Super Mario Bros. 3, which has a similar underlying metaphor that its world is a literal stage, and that the whole adventure is performative. Decorado doesn’t quite rise to the level of the greatest NES game of all time, but it does make you think a bit, and it’s weird in all the right ways.
Grade: B
GOAT
I skipped this during its theatrical run for two main reasons. One, as a February release, there was a decent chance it would suck, and the previews did nothing to disabuse me of that fear. Two, I definitely didn’t have the cash to fritter away on a kid-centric sports movie whose premise was inherently faulty. Just like I won’t watch Snow White and the Huntsman because of the absurd pretense that Kristen Stewart is objectively hotter than Charlize Theron, so too did I not care to watch a movie about basketball where everyone insists that “small can’t ball” when I’ve literally watched the likes of Allen Iverson, Mugsy Bogues, Earl Boykins, Spud Webb, and Isaiah Thomas (no relation to Isiah) have stellar careers. Also, the entire joke of the title is conflating a literal goat with the most annoying acronym in sports, short for “Greatest of All Time.” Having finally seen it, I can safely say that this movie is definitely not that.
The latest Sony Pictures Animation feature to say, “Hey, the Spider-Verse films are popular. Let’s just do that for everything,” GOAT is your basic sports underdog story, stylized for no reason other than to stylize it, but at least this one has the added joy of Under Armour and Mercedes product placement. You know, for kids! Anyway, the story, formulaic to the core, revolves around Will Harris (Caleb McLaughlin from Stranger Things), a pygmy goat who dreams of playing “roarball,” which is just like basketball, except that it’s… not called basketball. Seriously, for half the film this sport struggles to justify its name, to the point that it’s almost unintelligible when the characters say it out loud (depending on who says it, it sounds like “realball,” “worldball,” “whirlball,” “rowball,” and “ruhlball” when they really want to slur it), it’s not actually spelled out until over a half hour in, and the professional league name, ROAR, actually stands for “Regional Organized Animal Roarball,” which I’d say is straight out of the Department of Redundancy Department, except that joke is clever, and this is just stupid.
Anyway, Will grew up idolizing a panther named Jett Fillmore (Gabrielle Union), the star player for his local team, the Vineland Thorns – the only changes made to the basic game of basketball are that each team has an environment-based court and arena, the league is co-ed, and the ball is more of a bouncing wiffle ball than a fully-inflated rubber ball. Jett is statistically one of the greatest players in the game’s history, but because she and the Thorns have never won a championship (dubbed the “Claw”), she can never be considered the “GOAT,” truly the most tragic of outcomes. Instead, the current take-industrial complex is clamoring to crown a horse named, and I’m not kidding here, Mane Attraction (Aaron Pierre) as the new GOAT, which is itself a contradiction in terms, as the ALL TIME part means that the title can’t be transactional from year to year.
So, Jett is desperate for a legacy-sealing title, and Will, despite his skill, can never be taken seriously because he’s a “small” (he protests that goats are “mediums”), and thus can never get a shot at playing professionally. Opportunity strikes when Mane hosts a “taking all comers” challenge at the local courts, and Will is able to score two baskets on him. Clips of their showdown go viral, and the Thorns team owner, a sleazy hog (because subtlety is for cucks) named Flo Everson (Jenifer Lewis – Mama Odie from The Princess and the Frog) decides to sign Will to the team as a gimmick to sell tickets. If you’ve ever seen Major League, you know what she’s all about.
Jett is furious at the signing, and refuses to let Will play, despite the fact that she’s not the coach (that honor goes to Patton Oswalt as a proboscis monkey called Dennis). When fate forces the situation to change (I guess that’s the other major difference between “roarball” and basketball… no bench players or roster depth), Will proves himself and helps the team win, and the parade of clichés can truly begin.
I’ll admit that some of the basketball action is good… once we actually get to it. We basically only see four games, and three of them are in the final act. I also like the comic relief duo of sports commentators, an ox and fruit bat named Chuck and Rusty (Andrew Santino and Bobby Lee, respectively), who have excellent banter. And every once in a while, the Spider-Verse animation style works for a quick joke or two.
But other than that, there’s not much to recommend. The plot is basic and predictable, with every turn seemingly spit out by ChatGPT. The rest of the team – an exhausted rhino father voiced by David Harbour, a draft bust Ostrich named Olivia (Nicola Coughlan from Bridgerton) who’s afraid of being mocked on social media, a giraffe and aspiring rapper called Lenny (NBA all-star and celebrity executive producer of the film, Stephen Curry), and a VERY off-putting Komodo dragon named Modo (Nick Kroll) – really don’t add all that much to the equation. This is especially true for Lenny, as Curry himself was written off by some initially for his size (he’s 6’2″, considered undersized for an NBA player), and for being “just” a shooter, similar to Will once he makes the team. Now, you’d think his presence might lend a bit of “I’m living proof” credibility to the film’s underlying concept, giving lie to the idea that being “short” doesn’t mean you can’t be an elite player. But instead, not only is the “small can’t ball” theme basically taken at face value throughout 98% of the movie, but Curry plays a giraffe who is ONLY valued for his height, and the flick never does anything with it.
I mean, this was a golden opportunity to throw this idiocy in the faces of the likes of Stephen A. Smith and other sports media loudmouths who think yelling equals having a point. When I worked at ESPN, one of the most hilarious and telling moments came in 2007, when Smith would go on every show and basketball segment to scream endlessly that Greg Oden should be the #1 pick in the coming NBA draft over Kevin Durant. “YOU CAN’T TEACH SEVEN FEET! YOU CAN’T TEACH SEVEN FEET!” he’d cackle over and over again, his essential point being that Oden, at 7’0″, was automatically more valuable and likely to succeed in the league than the 6’11” Durant, who only “scored points,” which my sources say is how winners are determined in games. But what do I know? Oden had only played half a season at Ohio State, spending months sidelined with a wrist injury, and was a big question mark heading into the draft. Would he recover and become a superstar, or would he be another version of Sam Bowie, who was picked ahead of Michael Jordan in 1984 because of his size, only to flame out and never make any real impact on the league.
Well, history repeated itself. As is often the case, you can’t teach seven feet, but you also can’t teach seven feet to get out of his own way. Oden went first to Portland (who also drafted Bowie), immediately suffered a knee injury that ended his rookie season before it started, and he was out of the league within seven years. Durant, on the other hand, has won two championships, two Finals MVP awards, a league MVP, and four gold medals as part of the US Olympic team. Not bad for someone who just “scores points.” What I’m saying is that Stephen A. Smith (and those like him) is an ignorant blowhard and no one should listen to him. Also, having Steph Curry play a giraffe who only has height was an excellent opportunity to show how size can be an asset in the game, but it clearly isn’t everything. The film let that chance slip by without a second thought.
Elsewhere, the story is lame, having Jennifer Hudson play Will’s mom just to kill her offscreen is yet another example of the cheap trope of dead parents being a motivator, Wayne Knight and Sherry Cola are wasted in thankless roles, and the true figurative elephant in the room (as opposed to the many literal ones on the screen) never gets addressed, which is the fact that far too much of the story is instigated or influenced by social media and idiots who won’t just put their phones down and live. Seriously, Will never makes the league if not for whatever TikTok knockoff gets used because the real TikTok wouldn’t pay for product placement. Olivia’s entire neurosis comes from negative online comments. Jett’s initial hatred of Will is used more for press conference sound bites than anything else, trying to get him “cancelled” for not liking cockroaches, which are also sapient in this world. So much of this movie falls apart if people just look up and forward and see what’s actually in front of them, which I’m sure was Sony’s intent all along.
Grade: C
The Last Whale Singer
Before I get to the movie itself, I want to share my experience in seeing The Last Whale Singer with you, because I think it’s a perfect example of the problem with the theatrical model right now. I saw the trailer twice at my local AMC, which is about 3/4 of a mile away from my house. There are actually two right next to each other, a regular multiplex and a dine-in. So when I saw the preview, prefaced with that familiar baritone voiceover saying, “Coming soon to an AMC near you,” I naturally assumed it would be one of those two. At worst, it would be the one at the Century City mall on Santa Monica Blvd, which is a 15-20 minute drive depending on traffic and time of day.
Instead, the closest theatre showing it – and I mean any theatre, not just AMC – was in Burbank, a 45-minute drive on the best days. It was also only showing once a day, in a single auditorium with a capacity of 37 people. Knowing the obligations I was going to have on the film’s opening weekend, my only option was for the sole Sunday morning show, so I booked a day in advance, figuring the picture wouldn’t get a second week in its run if this is what constituted “near” me. To my shock, when I went to book, the show was almost sold out. There were only two seats in the back row and four in the front row available. I snatched one of the back ones (I HATE craning my neck in the front row), and made the drive thinking that maybe there was something to this movie if the screening was basically full. As it turned out, the reason for the crowd was that a young girl was having her birthday party at the theatre/mall, and half the tickets were for her friends and their parents. Still, I had hope, because the rest of the crowd was a healthy mix of adults, kids, and adults with little kids.
Then AMC took over. Just like at most other screenings, the “showtime” was not the showtime, and the trailers didn’t even start until five minutes after the designated time. I was sitting next to a four-year-old and his mom, and the poor boy was very confused. “Is this the movie?” he asked during the first preview. “Is THIS the movie?” he asked again during the second, third, fourth, fifth, and sixth trailers. When AMC interrupted the trailer reel for their new grotesquerie of inserting commercials in the middle – this time for Amazon Prime Days and Allstate Car Insurance, two entities the kids just go gaga over – the boy was at his limit, as was I. “When is it gonna start?” he nearly cried, his mom doing everything in her power to calm him, which wasn’t helped by the birthday girl and her friends constantly running up and down the aisles and out of the auditorium, presumably for bathroom breaks or to bomb a hospital or something. Who can truly say? When the movie finally started, after two and a half minutes of AMC sucking its own dick via the narrator and Nicole Kidman, an audible “finally” rose up from the masses.
The actual film is basically the Temu version of Finding Nemo. A co-production of Germany, Czechia, and Canada, it’s about a humpback whale named Vincent (Vincent Tong), the last of his line of “whale singers,” who can use their songs to bring balance and peace to the ocean. After the death of his father Humphrey (Chimwemwe Miller), which is entirely Vincent’s fault, it’s up to him to find his song and defeat a dangerous leviathan who threatens to destroy the sea. He’s joined by his nanny, a suckerfish called Walter (Bruce Dinsmore) and eventually a sassy but somehow deaf orca named Darya (Jenna Wheeler-Hughes).
There are some good ideas here, but the execution is completely slapdash. The whales’ “songs” are just them melodically saying “Ahh-ahh-ahh” rather than coming up with something sonically creative. Darya is deaf yet she carries on conversations with other characters that are nowhere near her line of sight (she claims to be able to lip-read), making her disability meaningless, especially when the healing powers of whale song don’t actually fix her hearing. There’s a scene at the Great Pacific Garbage Patch (a floating archipelago of trash twice the size of Texas) where Vincent’s journey is temporarily stymied, but rather than it being used as a real example of environmental destruction to contrast with the mystical threat of the leviathan, it’s just a set piece for a bunch of bullshit with some seals. The background animation is actually pretty bright and colorful, but the 3D modeling of the cast is straight out of the knockoff DVD bin. What’s more, the plot is so boring that the little guy sitting next to me fell asleep about an hour in. Had the flick started on time instead of waylaying us with 35 minutes of ads and nonsense, he’d have made it all the way through.
AMC Theatres. We make movies better.
Grace: C+
Swapped
This Netflix feature is the definition of “nothing special,” but it has gotten a lot of attention, including a reported 38 million views in its first week on the streamer, knocking KPop Demon Hunters off its perch as the most popular animated film on the platform. Could it be the next sensation? Could it score the Big Red N back-to-back victories in the Animated Feature contest? Will it prove to be the cultural phenomenon that HUNTR/X has been for the last year, regardless of my personal taste?
I’m going to go out on a limb and say, hahahahahahahahahahahaha, no.
The movie is fine. It’s not offensive by any means, but it’s so damn basic and kiddie friendly that I can’t even hate on it ironically. It’s just… there. The story, set in a weird fantastical forest where animals and plants are sort of hybrid species, centers on a “pookoo” named Ollie, voiced by Michael B. Jordan. Pookoos are sort of like a jumble of sloths and gophers, with a little bit of bush sticker thrown in for good measure. His kind are naturally distrustful and scared of other creatures, hiding in their little isolated island and feeding on these sort of berry-nut-pea things. As a child, Ollie showed a young chick from a bird-leaf species called the Javan how to access these foods, and as a result, the Javan swarm and take the majority of the Pookoos’ supply, leading them to the brink of starvation.
All of this interspecies fear comes from a legend of the Dzo, tree-like elephants who can grow magical pods that allow the creatures to communicate with each other and change their forms. This gift was usurped by a tree-wolf who gave itself the power of fire, burning down large chunks of the valley and damming the river, thus banishing the Dzo from the area. As the film’s title would suggest, one day Ollie comes across one of these pods while fighting off some Javan, and by stating the species name, he becomes one. Able to talk to them, he meets a bird called Ivy (Juno Temple), who in turn accidentally says “pookoo” while touching a pod and turns into one herself. Thus, we have our body swap adventure.
There is some creativity on display, but most of that ends with the designs of the animal-plant hybrids. You have deer made out of birch, hedgehogs made from pinecones, moss-covered bears, and other really eye-catching designs. It’s also a nice bit of symbolism about how nature, in all its forms, exists in a symbiotic relationship. There are some pretty clever action set pieces, vibrant colors, and just enough obfuscation in the plot that the target audience of little kids won’t instantly figure out all the twists and turns, though their parents certainly will.
The problem is that it’s all just too entry-level. The dialogue leaves a lot to be desired. Far too much is waved off as “magic” so we can avoid massive holes in the narrative’s logic. The film makes two aborted attempts at pretending the protagonists might actually die, but given who this is aimed at – not to mention Netflix’s directives about overstating the plot beats for second screen viewers – you know the filmmakers don’t have the balls to actually kill off anyone we care about.
But worst of all is the voice cast. Jordan and Temple do alright, but the rest of the ensemble is just straight up bad. Cedric the Entertainer plays Ollie’s father like an overprotective stereotype, and it just sounds completely off. It’s like he’s trying to be George Costanza’s father without the comedic timing. The worst of the lot is Tracy Morgan as Boogle, a rainbow trout-like kelp fish in the valley’s river who befriends Ollie and Ivy, helping them to find more magic pods. Now, I love Tracy Morgan, always have, but his voice does not fit the character by any means. Hell, given the film’s setting, every time Ollie or Ivy asks for help, I’m half expecting him to shout, “I’M BRIAN FELLOW!” It’d make as much sense as anything else the character says.
Given the intended demographic, the picture is perfectly adequate. It has a nice message about not being afraid of other people or prejudging based on appearances, and there’s a small conservation message as well, but that’s about it. If you really want your kids to get all these good things with some real heft behind them, both from an artistic and moral standpoint, just have them watch Hoppers instead.
And kids, no matter what this movie tells you, don’t eat anything you see called a “pod.” You won’t turn into a magical animal. You’ll just get taken to the ER to have your stomach pumped.
Grade: B-
***
That’s it for this edition, folks. I’ve got a couple more reviews in my backlog, and hopefully by this time next week I’ll be back in the regular swing of things, just in time for the meat of Summer Blockbuster Season. Thanks for sticking with me!
Join the conversation in the comments below! Did you see any of these films? Which was your favorite? Why is Depression so good looking, like we’re meant to think our own misery is a natural attraction? Let me know! And remember, you can follow me on Twitter (fuck “X”) as well as Bluesky, subscribe to my YouTube channel for even more content, and check out the entire BTRP Media Network at btrpmedia.com!
I Actually Paid To See This 