Main thing that this movie has going for it, is that's an entertaining one to watch. Other than that, both story- and character-wise, this is hardly the best animated movie you could watch.
So, it's using an original approach by focusing on just the main villain and the movie has no big, great heroes in it but 'evil' is of course a very relative thing, in this animated movie, that's aimed toward mostly young children.
Of course no one gets seriously harmed and none of the situations ever get seriously threatening or suspenseful. It's a mild, fluffy and colorful movie, in which the evil plans concern things like stealing well known landmarks and trying to shrink the moon. And of course the villainous main character of this movie turns out to be not so evil and cold-hearted, once he adopts three young orphan girls. But why the girls start to like him and why they start to melt his cold heart is all still a bit of a mystery to me. It feels forced and therefore also never works out as anything cute or heartfelt.
It's all a bit too simplistic and predictable for my taste. Nothing ever comes as a surprise in this movie, which is fine for young kids but adults and older teens are likely to be bothered more by this.
So predictability is one problem with this movie but another one are its characters. Besides it's main character, all of the other character who appear in this movie remain terribly underdeveloped and remain stuck, somewhere in the background. They are mostly just there to fill the screen, it seems. They don't add enough, while some of them clearly had far more potential to them.
Yet, the movie most definitely is a far from awful one. It's simply enjoyable enough for what it is and offers some quality entertainment, with some fine looking animations and nicely executed comical sequences involved. On a technical level, there just isn't much wrong with this movie. Also despite my criticism toward the movie its characters, they are still all some fine, fun and distinctive looking characters. It's the sort of animated movie that uses an exaggerated style for all of its characters, instead of a more realistic one. Old fashioned, cartoon-like, so to speak, which works out very well for this particular movie.About the voice-acting; Well, apparently it featured the voices of Steve Carell, Jason Segel, Russell Brand, Julie Andrews and many more well known names in it but I didn't recognized a single one of them while watching and listening to this movie. Makes me wonder what the point of it all is to cast some well known and big names in your movie, when the viewer isn't going to be able to recognize any them. Sure, it looks good on the posters and such but seeing how this movie is mostly targeted toward young kids, I don't see how this really matters. They don't know who Steve Carell is, they don't care about Jason Segel or Russell Brand, so why bother? Simply safe yourself some more money by getting some lesser known but just as good and cheaper to get voice actors. But oh well, the same of course could be said about every big animated movie, of the past few decades. It's just something that's truly starting to bother me these past few years, as I watch more and more animated movies with big names involved, who just don't add enough to the actual movie. And don't get me wrong, the voice acting isn't bad for this movie but surely they could have gotten some other, lesser known, actors to do the job and it wouldn't have affected the eventual end result. in any way or form.
But seriously, despite all the criticism, this remains a perfectly watchable and also quite enjoyable animated movie, that especially young kids are absolutely going to love.
7/10
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