2007 children's movieRating: 6/20 (Jen: 3/20; Emma: 8/20; Abbey: 10/20)
Plot: Some lazy Chinese kid finds the annoying titular fruit which promises to give him anything he wants. Predictably, it doesn't turn out to be a good thing.
Gooby vs. Gourd--which children's movie magical character is more irritating? I think their fuzzy and flesh respectively neck and neck. Gourd's got a really annoying voice (voiced by somebody named Corbin Bleu which is almost an Arby's sandwich), crosses his arms above his mouth, spews far too many bad puns (as if there's another kind of pun), says things like "What's the diff?", raps poorly, and for reasons that I will never understand no matter how much I try to understand them, was animated with an anus. I think this is my first "anus" on shane-movies.blogspot.com, and I didn't figure it would be a children's movie that was a collaboration between Disney and China that would be responsible for it. It's possible that I was just seeing things, but I'm willing to bet you my youngest child, who actually seemed to like some of this, that this thing had an anus.
Now one of the biggest issues with this is some bad dubbing. It might not be fair to make fun of a movie for bad dubbing, but it's not like some cheapo dvd production company is taking a cheesy kung-fu movie and throwing in a bunch of voices that sound like John Wayne. This is freakin' Disney! And poor voice decisions were made here, not limited to the Corbin Bleu. And the translation? "Whenever you work hard, better is your level of satisfaction" sounds like something Yoda would say.
The movie doesn't just sound bad. The special effects--very plasticky CGI gunkiness--do create some interesting individual visuals, however. The kid running beside his bike while a frog flees on two legs might be my chase scene of the year, and a scene with some flying fish looked kind of cool. But the gourd is rubbery and doesn't always mesh with the setting or other characters as well as he should. And there's this scene featuring a circle of junk food that nearly gave me a seizure. A lot of the effects here are just gross. Dinosaurs, a parade of toys, flying books, a space ship. This thing was just ugly.
This was a family movie night selection. The idea with family movie night was that we would take turns picking movies, but I forced this one on my family because I remember seeing a preview of it (those fish, I think) and thinking it looked pretty good. Whoops. Little did I know that it had a Corbin Bleu in it. Of course, there may be some cultural things that my family and I just don't understand. For example, the main character--some annoying and really unlikable kid--saying "Huh!" in an angry way to end about three conversations. To me, that seemed goofy, but maybe in China it's completely normal. Or the grandmother's obsession with toe nails which didn't work for me as a recurring joke and for some reason seemed to offend Jennifer. Jennifer, by the way, referred to this as Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Gourd at one point which distracted us enough to stop paying attention to the movie to come up with more titles. The Maltese Gourd, Indiana Jones and the Gourd of Doom, How to Train Your Gourd, I Spit on Your Gourd. That was more fun than the movie. One more thing: This lost another point because of the song playing over the end credits. I imagined this conversation:
Chinese people: [playing song] Did you like it?
Disney people: God no! That was awful! We can't use that.
Chinese people: I'm sorry, but this is Asia. That is the way we end our movies.
Disney people: Ok, fine. But this is going to cost us a point or two on Shane's blog.
If I were you, I would not watch this movie with your family. I'd watch I Spit on Your Gourd instead. Of course, I am me and I did watch this with my family, so what do I know?
Seriously though. An anus.
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