I am very split on this movie. It's not bad, but also nothing special.
First off:
The visuals and character designs are lovely! Like several recent Sony Animations movies, this one was visually really nice and the animations were nice once you get used to the "stuttering" animations style. (similar to "Supa Team 4" or the combat scenes from "Puss in Boots: The Last Wish."
The general story is the really basic "underdog", or, undergoat story including all of it's tropes and stereotypes: "person with the wrong size/race/species/upbringing wants to do skill x, everyone laughs about them, until they show them they're awesome at it". Done for every sport, every craft, etc.
That's not bad, per se. The problem for me is mainly the movie's first half: You know how these movies always have that one angry, asshole person that tells the protagonist they're never gonna make it, that never takes them for serious? Like Tigress in Kung Fu panda, and every "rival" in underdog movies?
Officially that's "Jett" in this movie. But factually it's EVERYONE in the first half, except the main character's "best friends".
And while having ONE doubting ass can be a cool thing to overcome, having basically a whole team's personalities reduced to "you don't care about this guy" made me really wonder if the movie will feature any non-assholes at all.
AS SOON as the second half starts, the moment where the protagonist finally shows off his skills and the characters suddenly get actual personality, the whole movie becomes MUCH better.
Sadly this happens far too late, and instead of showing so long-winded how nobody thinks he can do it, they should've cut that short and instead used the free time to draw out the actual emotional scenes longer. Because THOSE have potential and show much more personality, but one very important emotional part is even cut short into a montage, and that's just...really a pity.
In addition, based on the German dub, the movie heavily relies on modern "youth slang". To me this felt very, well, "cringe". But I accept that I'm most likely not the target audience and I'm willing to take a seat and accept that it's a thing of the current time which I'm not a part of anymore, so, I won't judge that harshly. 😅
Oh, also, gods, SO many product placements! I'm used to Xperia phones in Sony movies, but damn, phones, cars, clothes, I hate product placement in movies, and here several camera shots were very obviously done just to show off brand logos.
So, yeah. The movie is fine. It gets much better once the characters finally show personality and get emotional. This should happen much earlier and deeper, because it was when the movie was its strongest.
The story combines every single underdog-movie trope and features every underdog character stereotype. If you're fine with that, I'd say, watch the movie for its cool visuals. Not necessarily in an expensive cinema, though.
All that said: The diner sheep is a lovely motherly figure, I like her. Modo is fucked up in all the best ways possible.
And the aardwolf girl Hannah is the cutest, coolest, most awesome character, and I want more of her! ❤️
