Too tame and repetitive -- The Wild
Genre: Children's animation
Director: Steve `The Spaz' Williams
Cast: (voices) Kiefer Sutherland, Jim Belushi, Janeane Garofalo, Richard Kind, Eddie Izzard and William Shatner
Storyline: City slickers from the New York Zoo find themselves on a ship to the `Wild.'
Bottomline: Tired jokes, exhausted story. The animation is impressive, though.
This is the story of New Yorkers from the city zoo. They escape to find their friend, who is experiencing a personal crisis, and end up on a ship to the wild country. And the stars of this show are a lion, a giraffe, a zebra... Oh hang on, wrong movie.
`The Wild' is about a lion, a giraffe, a squirrel, a lisping idiot anaconda and a cross-dressing British koala bear, unlike `Madagascar' that had a hippo and a zebra.
Similar plots
The storylines are so similar that it is hard to believe they did not have the same writers. Ryan (Greg Cipes) is a zoo-bred lion cub who hasn't found his roar. He suspects that this is because he's never lived in the wild, like his majestic father, Samson (Kiefer Sutherland), the terror of all wildebeest. So he runs away and mistakenly gets shipped off to the wild.
Of course it would be a violation of the `Madagascar' plotline if the others didn't go after him, so you have Samson, his squirrel friend Benny (Jim Belushi) who, rather ambitiously, is in love with Bridget, a giraffe (voiced by Janeane Garofalo).
There is also a koala, Nigel (Eddie Izzard), who can't seem to get away from his disgustingly cute toy replica. And there is an anaconda (Richard Kind).
In `The Wild,' something's off. The lunatic wildebeest king (voiced by William Shatner) is tired of being bottom of the food chain, so he has decided that the wildebeest must become predators to move to the top. So naturally, he'll want a lion or two to get his appetite ... roaring.
The only effective aspect of the film is the sentimentality of the father-son (or rather lion-lion cub) relationship.
But on the whole, it just doesn't work because everything's been done before. Even the British koala, the most entertaining character of the lot, is too reminiscent of the chimpanzees from `Madagascar.' There is a scene where the wildebeest find him and worship him that is a lot like the one in `Ice Age 2' where Sid the sloth is worshipped as a fire god by hundreds of mini sloths.
However, it is a formula that children will probably enjoy.
SUSAN MUTHALALY
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