'Open Season': Recycled fun
By Jon Waterhouse
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Like "Over the Hedge," "Madagascar" and "The Wild" before it, "Open Season" is an animated fish-out-of-water tale about talking animals displaced from the comforts of home.
Somebody call the cartoon police.
Martin Lawrence mumbles along as the voice of Boog, a domesticated bear who lives in the garage of his forest ranger owner. Boog's steady diet of crackers and "Wheel of Fortune" is disrupted by Elliot (Ashton Kutcher), a misfit mule deer who nudges Boog out the door.
After a beautifully kinetic montage of Boog and Elliot trashing a quickie mart on a junk-food binge, Boog gets the boot. The ranger is forced to send him into the wild, where he must survive with wisecracking animals on the left and gun-toting hunters on the right.
Boog comes to terms with the great outdoors in between whiz-bang comic action sequences tailor-made for video game-devouring young people. But the visual assault, including tons of slapstick and an impressive white-water rapids scene, may go by faster than some attention deficit disorder-afflicted brains can process.
"Open Season" plays like a series of vignettes loosely linked together into one big picture. And that's one reason it doesn't hold up. Not to mention, potty humor in kiddie flicks — no matter how funny (or common) it is — is a cheap lunge at a laugh.
The filmmakers play with tired cultural stereotypes (a dachshund with a German accent, a Scottish squirrel named McSquizzy), but the movie's most effective exaggerated image strikes animation gold.
That's obsessed hunter Shaw, a not too distant cousin of Snidely Whiplash and Dick Dastardly, who provides plenty of goofy villain hilarity. The character's manic, herky-jerky animation, flowing mullet and the podunk howl of actor Gary Sinise make for a winning combination despite the movie's recycled storyline.
But while the cartoon police are busy filing a plot violation, they should bring up charges on artistic grounds, too. Sure, solid computer-generated imagery rarely fails to impress. The texture of Boog's fur has beaucoup depth. Foliage blows seamlessly in the breeze. Colors pop.
But the film's soulless, computerized mountain ranges can't touch the immaculate, hand-painted backgrounds of old-school Disney. If animation filmmakers are going to recycle, they need to go back. Way back.
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