I assume that Woody Woodpecker Goes to Camp (hereinafter WWGtC) was made for small children. Very small children. But then why make it 100 minutes long? The only way that the movie’s intended audience is going to sit through the whole thing is if they fall asleep in front of the screen.
The film starts out as a Forced from His Home that switches to Slobs vs. Snobs, and which then turns into a Treasure Hunt. Here’s an idea: pick one and stick with it.
Incredibly, it took three people to write this script, and it feels like each had his own, ahem, vision and no one was willing to compromise, so they crammed three different plots into a single kiddie flick.
Either that, or they just couldn’t come up with enough material to sustain a standalone premise (gee, do you think that’s why the Woody Woodpecker shorts were, well, short?); both possibilities are equally likely.
Anyway, Woody (Eric Bauza) gets kicked out of the forest for attacking a black man. Seriously, that happens. Also, the main villain is a black bird. I’m beginning to think that the title character should be called Woody Peckerwood instead.
Ranger Walters (Patrick Williams) tells Woody that he needs to “learn what it means to be part of a team.” Yeah, that’s what he needs to be taught a lesson in. Woody crosses the road, provokes an unseen car crash, and stumbles upon Camp Woo Hoo, which is “dedicated to teamwork.”
There, Woody is told that “We do get Team Badges at the end of every summer if we do all the activities.” Woody complains, “That sounds like work, and ‘work’ is my least favorite word” — somehow oblivious to the fact that you can’t spell ‘teamwork’ (the entire reason he’s there in the first place) without ‘work.’
Lucky for Woody, the only activity that the handful of campers with names and dialogue ever engage in is “training for the Wilderness Games” against the adjacent Camp Hoo Rah, which is run by Zane (Josh Lawson), who just happens to be Camp Woo Hoo’s owner Angie’s (Mary-Louise Parker) cousin.
Woo Hoo is allegedly a “STEAM Camp” (“science, technology, engineering, art, and math”), but Angie appears to be the only staff member (barring a couple of kitchen ladies in the background of one scene); she must secretly be quite a Renaissance woman (Camp Hoo Rah looks like some kind of military camp; other than that, it’s another one-person operation).
“Parks Inspector” Wally (Tom Kenny) is bent on shutting down Camp Woo Hoo (at the same time, he’s oddly unconcerned that Camp Hoo Rah’s new cook is a carrion bird; then again, Wally is a fucking Walrus, so maybe he’s biased), but Woody talks him into letting the Wilderness Games decide the fate of the camp.
That should be your movie right there. Camp Woo Hoo wins the games for the first time ever, Woody learns about teamwork (and, ideally, about tolerance), Zane learns about sharing, and everybody lives happily ever after — especially me, since the film would be over a lot sooner.
Conversely, the good guys use the gold that Buzz the Buzzard (Kevin Michael Richardson) was after to save Camp Woo Hoo etc., etc. The point is you don’t need two deus ex machinas; either Camp Woo Hoo wins the games against all odds, or the heroes unexpectedly strike gold (and if you must combine the two, let the Wilderness Games award a cash prize or something).
And speaking of overly complicated nonsensical schemes, Buzz’s plan is for “Zane to buy Woo Hoo’s land from Angie. Then I’ll blackmail him into giving [me] both camps.” Blackmail him how? Zane has “been signing for all my deliveries. Deliveries of things a guy could go to jail for signing.” That is to say, “Zane’s name is on all of Buzz’s illegal doohickeys.”
Yeah, but if “Little Gem” (the Acme Corporation knockoff from which Buzz orders his predictably backfiring Wile E. Coyote contraptions) were indeed a black-market supplier (and it sure doesn’t look that’s the case), why would they require anyone to sign for the packages? Wouldn’t leaving a paper trail be counterproductive for all parties involved?
I said that WWGtC was made for toddlers, but it’s more accurate to say that it was made at their expense. Here’s a film that thinks kids aren’t smart enough to have their intelligence insulted.
Granted, little children are not likely to detect the plothole I just described, but that’s not because they’re dumb so much as they’re naturally ignorant (the way that we all start out) — an ignorance that the filmmakers were as eager to exploit as they were unwilling to help remedy.
Not only is this movie not intellectually challenging, it’s also not artistically stimulating. WWGtC was proficiently shot, and Australian locations seldom disappoint; that said, the animated characters are, in one word, shit. Woody, for instance, hovers around (although I don’t remember him being able to levitate) like The Great Gazoo — now, if only it were Gazoo from the old TV show as opposed to Gazoo from The Flintstones in Viva Rock Vegas.
Whenever you see a live-action cast interacting (or attempting to interact) with cartoon characters, you immediately think back to Who Framed Roger Rabbit? (the gold standard for such a situation). Roger Rabbit was not meant to represent a real bunny any more than Woody is meant to be a real bird, but he was supposed to be a cartoon, and he looked the part (i.e., like someone actually drew him).
Roger was of course added in post-production, but he felt present because traditional animation has an immediacy that the computer-generated Woody sorely lacks. Even a photorealistic CGI woodpecker in a big-budget movie would seem less palpable than the cartoonish Roger Rabbit; this low-rent CGI woodpecker never stood a chance (the motion-captured Wally and Buzz don’t fare any better; the larger they are, the harder they suck).
The late-1950s The Woody Woodpecker Show featured live action/animation segments wherein Woody shared the screen with his creator Walter Lantz. All things considered, those segments have aged better in the past almost 70 years than WWGtC in the five days since it was released.
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