HERE’S AN animated feature that stresses the importance of following your dream. It also has to do with class prejudice, the tyranny of uncaring power and the virtues of loyalty. Nonetheless, it’s hard to think of a film that sets a worse example for young children.
The boom in digital animation has been in train for well over a decade. The 3D surge has been rumbling for about five years. What should film-makers do when offered these astonishing tools? Well, they could push the envelope and deliver work that experiments with both narrative and technology. Or they could just gather together a bunch of creaky anthropomorphic clichés and use the lowest grade of animation to ease them into fitful motion.
Heck, kids will go an see anything if it's in digitally animated 3D. Why bother making Upwhen you can make Blocky the Walrusor Ugly the Turtleor Alpha and Omega?
The latest insult to blameless kids everywhere has to do with a pair of wolves who fall in love while padding about one of Canada’s more angular and garish glacial valleys.
Humphrey (voiced by Justin Long) is among that class of low- grade slacker designated “Omegas” by the lupine elders. Kate (Hayden Panettiere) is an aristocratic Alpha. (The apparent reference to Bogart and Hepburn only adds to the accumulating atmosphere of second-handedness.)
Kate’s father, the pack leader, is currently in tense negotiations with a bellicose rival (Dennis Hopper in an ill-chosen final screen role) and, as a gesture of good will, arranges for his daughter to marry the evil chieftain’s son. But before the wedding can take place, Kate and Humphrey are kidnapped by park rangers and transported to Idaho. They must then make their way home.
Still awake? The film appears to have been generated by the crudest imaginable computer programme. The story is an uneasy amalgam of Shakespeare and Hammy Hamster. The backgrounds are horribly static and the valiant efforts at propelling objects towards the camera do nothing to compensate for the murkiness of the 3D imagery.
As for the inevitable comic relief, anybody who can explain why the Canadian goose plays golf deserves a lifetime's supply of Alpha and Omegalunchboxes.
Birdie? Eagle? No, that doesn’t work.
