★★☆☆☆
IN what feels like a cartoonish video game cutscene that goes on for 90 minutes, this South Korean-Canadian co-produced, but English dubbed, animation follows events on the intergalactic planet Bana that mostly consists of a monkey population. Once peacefully ruled over by a beloved king (Jordan Pettle) and queen (Hilary Swank), the planet was attacked and broken into pieces by the evil overlord General Zhong (Alan C Peterson), who goes on to rule with an iron fist.
Some 13 years later Spark (Jace Norman), a spirited teenage monkey and rightful heir to the Bana throne, is living on one of the planetary chunks now used for dumping rubbish. One day he and his friends – the battle-ready fox Vix (Jessica Biel) and tech genius warthog Chunk (Rob deLeeuw) – learn of Zhong’s secret plan to take over the universe and set out on a mission to stop him.
The best thing you could really say about this cheap and cheerful space-set animation is that it’s perfectly innocuous and is never short on being well-meaning. But that’s really as far as it goes in what is an annoyingly hyperactive mishmash of an animal-themed animated adventure – Zootropolis it most certainly ain’t – where too much is going on at any given moment and none of it makes any sort of impact. It all sort of blends into a personality-free blob of manic, plasticy colour.
It never does anything to get you involved or to believe in its world. It’s never anywhere near entertaining enough to bounce along in spite of that, even for its intended young demographic; that audience is a lot smarter than this gives them credit for.
The inexplicably star-studded cast does give it some credence, with Patrick Stewart as a heroic Scottish army captain who constantly gets punched in the face an undoubted highlight. But they’re stuck with generic, thinly written characters and jokes that just aren’t funny enough to make up for the flat and curiously charmless animation.
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