The Wild

1st of all, I tend to agree with other users who said that The Wild isn't an original. Yeah, in a way it is not an original. Disney seem to reuse their characters, and follow a somewhat same storyline, like their previous movies.

The storyline goes that the cub, Ryan was fed-up being compared to his Dad, and wished to be in the wild. But unlike the previous Disney movies, the poor Ryan was taken to the wild by accident. So his dad & their friends went on a trip to find and rescue Ryan.

So the adventure started! They found their ways through the urban New York, down the sewer and other places you'd usually do not find that animals there.

The animation is top notch, with details on the color texture, with smooth movement by the characters. The voice-over is also superb, especially Kiefer Sutherland's lion & the cuddly koala bear, Izzerd.

All in all, the movie is good for the whole family, be it a toddler or a teenager as it has very good moral values. The story do not have foul language, unlike Ice Age. The only drawback that this movie has it that the characters are very much alike the previous Disney movies such as Open Season and Madagascar. But apart from that, this movie simply rocks!

This movie was presented to the Dutch press in a small viewing room, but we sure got a good look at it. And really: this movie isn't bad at all. But compared to Chicken Little everything looks great I suppose.

The bad thing about The Wild is the appearance of its characters. They all look like they were borrowed from a toy store. That's probably good for merchandise, but for the movie that's plain bad. In a time in which even giant gorillas can make a believable performance thanks to CGI you can wonder why Disney chose for this option.

The first 20 to 30 minutes, when all the action takes place in the zoo, is very entertaining. There's a wonderful scene that involves curling and the escape out of the zoo is big fun. But when the animals enter the wild the movie becomes rather dull. The finale is okay though.

Of course people will compare this movie to the overrated Madagascar. But because of the story - a young lion wants to be as cool as its father - it resembles The Lion King more than the Dreamworks movie. So here's the good news: I think that viewers who liked Madagascar, will enjoy this movie too. It fills up the time until the real Disney computer animated blockbuster of this year will be released: Cars.

Well I hired this film out yesterday along with two others and must admit i was expecting to be the same old stuff in Disney films, but i was pleasantly surprised.

I thought it had good characters in and that the actors and actresses that did voice overs really took on the persona of the animal they were betraying and it made me laugh my favourite actor within film was Eddie izzard as he is so cool but saying that as i mentioned every one of them did good job.

Where watching this film is concerned defiantely give it a go as i think many people will be surprised i have not seen Madagascar but think this was under rated due to them coming out around about the same time, i am definitely added this to my collection when i get time.

At first, this appears to be a rip-off of "Madagascar," with New York City zoo animals leaving the comforts of "home" for the wilds of Africa. However, it is a totally different story and feel to it, more serious and sentimental than "Madagascar." Personally, I like "serious and sentimental" but not in animated movie, at least not to the degree it was in here. I preferred the other "NYC zoo" film to this one because "The Wild" lost almost all of its great humor in the last 20-30 minutes.

The first 50 minutes of this film was spectacular. I was thinking, "Wow, another great animated film. How many is that in the past year or so?" The jokes were excellent, the characters mostly funny and the animation superb. The dark, rich colors in here are magnificent. This is a beautiful movie! The minor characters are the best in here: the snake, koala bear and squirrel. Eddie Izzard, Richard Kind and Jim Belushi, in particular, are great in their voices of these characters. The two crocodiles that the wandering zoo animals meet in the sewers are hilarious. They produced the biggest laughs, at least with me. The major characters: the lion (Keifer Sutherland), his cub (Greg Cipes) and the giraffe (Janeane Garafolo) were all a little too much on the serious side.

Speaking of serious: the last third of this film totally switched gears. I wonder how this went over with very young kids and their parents? It got too serious, frightening in spots (for little ones) and then the usual corny Disney ending. It's too bad: this could have been super if they had just continued doing what was working the first 50 minutes.

For some reason, the various Hollywood studios occasionally display almost telepathic communication. Simultaneously, seemingly independently, they release two films which are very similar. We saw it with Dante's Peak and Volcano in 1997 (Two films in which a volcano erupts in a populated area of America), Deep Impact and Armageddon in 1998 (Two films where a giant meteor is going to destroy all life on Earth) and this year saw two studios revisiting the "capsizing cruise liner" genre with the Poseidon remake and the made-for-TV The Poseidon Adventure. Why do they do this? Surely it cannot be a coincidence. And films take years to produce, so it's not like one company can see an advert for a film and rush out their own version. Maybe it's because Hollywood is not a very secretive place. Ideas and scripts are touted round all the studios before they are bought, so it's not surprising that sometimes a company will set off down similar paths.

So, after last year's Madagascar was a reasonable hit for Dreamworks, arch-rivals Disney have "independently" come up with this, The Wild. A coincidence? Let's review the evidence.

Madagascar features a group of animals who are residents of a New York zoo. And so does The Wild.

In Madagascar, the group's leader is a lion, and it also includes a giraffe. And it's the same in The Wild.

In Madagascar, the group break out of the zoo to set off on a cargo ship for a remote jungle location. And it's the same in The Wild.

In Madagascar, the Lion comes to terms with the contrast between his pampered existence in captivity and life in the wild. And it's the same in The Wild.

And even the humorous sidekicks are similar. In Madagascar, the group are aided by a team of military penguins, who operate with hilarious efficiency and speak in short, sharp sentences. In The Wild, they're chameleons.

So if you have seen Madagascar, you've basically already seen the Wild, right? Not exactly. Because if you ignore those suspicious connections, The Wild is actually a different kind of film, with clear signs of its heritage. Madagascar is more about the comedy, while The Wild follows the classic Disney themes of family values and adventure against adversity. If Masdagascar is Shrek, The Wild is Finding Nemo.

Except that is too much of a compliment. The Wild is still a second-rate animated movie, clearly from the Disney half of the Disney-Pixar partnership. Kiefer Sutherland plays Samson the lion straight down the line. His motivation is just to save his son from volcanic fiery death, so he saves the jokes and pratfalls for his entourage, most notably the scene-stealing koala played by Eddie Izzard. In fact, Sutherland might as well be reprising his role from 24, where he was invariably trying to save his annoying daughter. Only this time he's a lion, of course.

The film dallies too much with tired old psychobabble father-son nonsense, much in the same way that spoiled Chicken Little earlier this year. The quality of the animation is another step forward in the ability of artists to render animals, and it takes a more natural approach to Madagascar that is really very impressive indeed.

But Madagascar stole the march, leaving The Wild look a little bit preachy and rather old-school.