It seems to me there was a time when the makers of children’s films would seek to enchant their audiences. When wit and wonder were of primary concern, and there would be no shying away from things that were perhaps moving or scary. There would be a conscious effort to make a kids’ film textured and maybe even a little bit complex, full of funny characters with personality. Something to whet the imagination. Animators like Hayao Miyazaki seem to still have their finger on an emotional pulse, and I have faith that Pixar will return to their more soulful work once they have Cars and Monsters out of their systems.
The new model – perhaps originally inspired by the aggressively average hit Shrek – seems to be far more shrill and aggressive. To yell and flail and fart and explode, tossing in pop hits and pop culture references, showing a clear desperation to distract youngsters as they consume more corn syrup. In the new animated film model, enchantment has taken a back seat to breathless, frantic action. It seems that as CGI animation has become more and more sophisticated (you can now see every individual hair on the bodies of talking squirrels), the jokes and plotting are only getting more and more stultifyingly basic. Your Shrek 2s, your Shark Tales, your Barnyards, your Kung-Fu Pandas, your Space Chimps.
Peter Lepeniotis’ The Nut Job is of the latter model. It’s a cacophony of screaming unfunny characters, sloppy plotting, and uninspired animation. The plot meanders without any direct goals in mind, and the film stops for minutes at a time for painfully protracted slapstick set pieces. It feels too long, and reeks of padding. Which I suppose makes sense; The Nut Job was adapted from an 11-minute short film called Surly Squirrel.
It’s also hard to suss out the messages of the film. The protagonist of The Nut Job is a surly squirrel named Surly (Will Arnett) who steals nuts from New York peanut vendors. He is also hated by the critters in the local park, as he is a free agent, and the critters share their food. Surly is greedy and selfish, and over the course of the film, he’ll learn to share. A positive enough message for tots. Only the leader of the park critters, Raccoon (Liam Neeson) is eventually revealed to be a greedy hoarder himself, who talks to his henchmole about controlling food supply to keep the other critters “in control.” There are also several scenes of voting (“I say we banish him! All in favor, raise your paw!”), led by charismatic autocrat mammals. One can’t help but read in some sort of anti-Socialist agenda into such scenes. As such, one can get the impression that this is a big screen adaptation of “Revolt of the Beavers,” the anticapitalist children’s musical glimpsed in 1999’s Cradle Will Rock.
But the biggest sins of The Nut Job are all right there on the surface. It’s not funny, it’s too noisy, and it’s sloppy. In addition to the squirrels and rats and moles, there are also human characters in the film, all planning a parallel bank heist while Surly plans his great nut heist from the humans. The parallel stories should have worked, but they seem speedy and perfunctory, constantly interrupted by things breaking and people yelling. And fart jokes. Yes, there are fart jokes. Had the filmmakers bothered to include a sense of scale, perhaps The Nut Job would have worked better. In something like Ratatouille, we got a sense of how big the rats were in relation to the humans, and, as a result, a better sense of how they interacted. Such scenes are absent from The Nut Job, notwithstanding a few nice-try scenes of humans and raccoons in the same shot, oblivious to one another’s dramas.
And the credits are most certainly worth noting. I suppose I should have expected a mainstream Hollywood animated feature to eventually play the Korean pop hit “Gangnam Style” over its credits; it’s painfully logical after Smash Mouth ruined everything. But did we need to have the song’s performer Psy animated onscreen, dancing the pony with squirrels and gophers? Did we need to have a music video of a pelvic-thrusting raccoon? I can’t decide if this is better or worse than the “I Like to Move It” numbers from the truly beastly Madagascar. If, however, you notice that the bulk of The Nut Job‘s staff and production team are Korean, perhaps you can see a twinge of Korean national pride leaking through.
Which is perhaps the weirdest thing to see in an American kid flick about talking squirrels.
Witney Seibold is a featured contributor on the CraveOnline Film Channel, and co-host of The B-Movies Podcast. You can read his weekly articles Trolling, Free Film School and The Series Project, and follow him on “Twitter” at @WitneySeibold, where he is slowly losing his mind.
