No Good Very Bad Movies 11: The one Disney forgot to unmovie

 

Title: The Wild

What Year?: 2006

Classification: Runnerup/ Evil Twin

Rating: Dear God WHY??!! (1/3)

 

In the course of this feature, the trickiest part has been deciding what belongs here or under my other features. With the present review, I have an egregious case in point, a slot I intended to fill but had to research or view several different movies to find just what I was looking for. I did this all in parallel with my animation reviews, and I went through about 5 leads before I was sure I had the most egregious example worth the trouble of actually watching. I present The Wild, as nothing less than the “worst” Disney animated movie ever made, and certainly the most completely forgotten and forgettable.

Our story begins with a lion telling his son of his life in the wild, while a crowd of zoo visitors stroll by. In short order, we meet a cast of wacky characters, led by a koala whose accent seems stuck between cockney and British snob, a snake who sounds like Jar Jar Binks, and a friendly squirrel in love with a giraffe. After the zoogoers laugh at the lion cub’s roar (in case it’s not obvious enough, cubs can’t roar), he sets out to prove his worth with an escape attempt, or something. Instead, he ends up locked in a cargo container on a ship carrying rehabilitated animals back to Africa for release, which would actually be interesting. So, we go back to the zoo animals, who essentially walk out into the big city on a mission to retrieve the wayward cub, fully confident in the adult lion born in the wilderness. Just when this also starts to look interesting, the animals board a second ship bound for a generic African island. To make it look like things are actually happening, the characters are bombarded with the likes of psychedelic chameleons, dancing dung beetles, a hyrax who is offended by not being eaten, and a psychotic wildebeest who wants to eat a lion to absorb the strength of a predator, or something. And if you still care what happens, you have this reviewer’s pity!

The Wild was a 2006 CGI animated film by Disney and CORE Feature Animation, with the latter reportedly handling both the animation and most responsibilities for the film. Controversy arose from similarities with Dreamworks’ Madagascar, released the previous year. By consensus, the Disney film was in production before the Dreamworks film, with some accusing Dreamworks of infringement (see Antz). The film boasted a high-profile voice cast headlined by Eddie Izzard as the koala and Kiefer Sutherland as the father lion. Other cast included Jim Belushi as the squirrel Benny, Janeane Garofalo (see Mystery Men) as the giraffe and William Shatner as the villain Kazar. The movie was scored by Alan Silvestri, with Everlife performing the original song “Real Wild Child”. The movie received mixed to favorable reviews, particularly regarding the animation, which some characterized as “uncanny valley”. The film received a box office of $102.3 million against an $80M budget, underperforming both Madagascar and the subsequent Dreamworks film Over The Hedge, which also featured Shatner. It remains available on home video including streaming.

For my experiences, I set out as outlined above on my quest for the actual worst Disney animated movie within the last month. Outside the 2000s direct-to-video sequel boom, there were three that rose to the top very quickly: The Black Cauldron, Chicken Little, and this movie. What set this one apart was just how unknown it is, especially for a film well within the last 2 decades. I knew of it because I saw reviews and mentions of it when it came out, yet I had literally never seen it mentioned spontaneously anytime since. Even other people’s irate lists of worst Disney movies (my main sources for Chicken Little) mostly overlooked it. The only other movie I reviewed with less chatter than this was Two Evil Eyes, a movie that among other things was in the gray area for having a general theatrical release at all. With that kind of Wall of Nothing, I knew a viewing was in order. After going through it, I’m definitely making sure somebody feels my pain.

Moving forward, the central reality of this film is that there’s very little that seems “that bad” at face value. What it presents instead is a wonky, off-center quality that might charitably be granted as unsettling if this was supposed to be a teen-to-adult-oriented satire or dark fantasy, but here feels deceptive and treacherous. Within that, there is way too much that just doesn’t work. Just for example, the movie tries to set up the arc of the lion cub as an analogue for a preteen/ adolescent coming of age, but by actual biology, any cat that far along wouldn’t be that much smaller than an adult. The disparity, in turn, makes the posited humiliation of not being able to roar simply nonsensical, unless the lions are simply reading human amusement as mockery. The issues stretch to the voice work which should have been a redeeming virtue, egregiously Izzard, who seems unable to make up his mind on an accent, and Shatner, whom I literally didn’t recognize. (I could go into a whole other rant about the squandering of Kind, whom I praised reviewing A Bug’s Life, but the fault clearly doesn’t lie with him.) Then there’s more that offers an early preview of the more problematic trends of the modern Disney era: Villains who appear in the final act simply because none was set up (or needed) before; pop-heavy music; multiple “comic relief” characters doing their bits over each other; and logical implications, including what to eat, that are ignored when inconvenient to the story.

Then for the deeper dive, what I can’t avoid is comparison not just with Madagascar but with Over The Hedge. The similarities to Madagascar are really not that remarkable, if one is familiar with the phenomenon of the runnerup, which as I outlined back with The Black Hole has less to do with the creators than the studios who choose where to send their money. That said, it at least bears comment that Madagascar was specifically about the tensions between a domesticated lion and his lifelong friends on being returned to the wild, complete with visions of other characters as dancing steaks. (Yes, I remember that from the theater.) It is by comparison with Over The Hedge, which I went so far as to watch win the course of the present review, that this falls into “Evil Twin” territory. Almost everything about that movie worked, including William Shatner playing himself as the overacting possum. The animation especially bears attention. On that front, The Wild is by any standard the far superior film, but I find it like comparing a still life with a comic book. For the things that really matter- characterization, natural and dynamic movement, even vivid colors- Over The Hedge beats The Wild over the head with a splintered, nail-studded table leg and pisses on it while it’s lying stunned in the gutter.

That still leaves the “one scene”, and that’s annoying me just because I had to go back and look at several scenes. That requires a couple honorable mentions, a couple Italian-stereotype gators that are actually funny (how does the giraffe fit in a sewer tunnel?) and a tribal wildebeest musical number that’s actually good. But the surreal moment I had to give a closer look is the hyrax, voiced by Colin Cunningham. As the father lion looks for his son, he instead discovers a hyrax on an improvised toilet, who promptly shouts a warning (or something) through the plumbing. When the lion insists that his “instincts” led him to prey, his friends get excited to see him in action, until even the hyrax is willing to accept his fate. It goes far enough for the lion to raise the little taxonomic nightmare to his open mouth, but then he drops him. At first, the hyrax assumes this is a literal cat and mouse game, but then becomes explosively indignant when the lion lets him go. In a completely surreal moment, he even extols the health and flavor of his own flesh before storming off. It’s mind-boggling, it’s surreal, and it’s by far the best this movie ever gets.

In closing, the question remains, is this the “worst” Disney movie? The real answer is my standard objection to the whole “worst” concept, which applies even more for an outfit as old as Disney is. I can’t argue that there are movies I didn’t check out that are probably worse, but on the other hand, my experiences are wide enough that I could have pointed to absolutely horrible ones that most people have never even heard of. My key consideration is that there are degrees and kinds of failure, all well-represented in the Disney vault. There are movies that failed commercially in their own time, like no less than Fantasia. There are movies that failed to stay relevant or acceptable with changing attitudes, like Song of the South. There are movies that are flat-out hated, like The Black Cauldron and Chicken Little. What The Wild presents is the center of the Ven diagram of all possible levels of failure, mediocre, unprofitable and forgotten. My final verdict is the same assessment I reached when it was sight unseen: This is the kind of disaster that crashes and doesn’t even have the intrinsic merit to burn. There are worse movies from Disney and elsewhere (see the Gobots movie), yet even they are rarely as forgettable and outright tiresome as this. And with that, I am done.