Movie Review - Wonder Park

MegaSoulhero Feels like it’s been a while since I did a review. Anyway, the new animated film Wonder Park has recently come out. As a huge fan of amusement parks, I was interested in this film. It looked very magical and looked like it would capture the joy of being in an amusement park. However, the movie has been getting bashed by critics. I mean, come on. It can’t be that bad, right?

An hour and 25 minutes later...

Well, the cops are looking for me now because I just burned down a bunch of houses. It felt like the proper reaction after watching this train wreck of a film. I cannot BELIEVE this thing made it into theaters! It is so awful! Absolutely atrocious! And I’m gonna tear it apart right now!

It’s about a girl named June who often imagines making her own amusement park called Wonderland. And yes, the park is called Wonderland. Not Wonder Park. Despite that being the title of the movie. Anyway, her mom goes away for a while and then during a trip, June wanders into a forest and realizes that Wonderland came to life. She meets the animal mascots of the park and they work together to rebuild the park and stop the darkness. First off, my one positive with this film is that the animation is beautiful. The scenery is just phenomenal and there are so many details. There’s a lot of creativity put into many scenes. Especially the amusement park scenes. There’s so much color and it really feels magical. It’s just so appealing to look at. Unfortunately, that’s all this movie has going for it. The beginning of this film is absolutely boring. It mainly focuses on June spending time with her family and building Wonderland and stuff like that and it goes on for too long. It doesn’t help the these characters are not interesting. Throughout that whole beginning, I was wondering when we would actually get to the amusement park. When it actually got to that part, it was absolute rushed and hard to watch. This movie is under 90 minutes long, which sacrifices any kind of development they could’ve given to the amusement park and the characters. We see some of the park at the beginning and at the end, but most of the middle section is just them trying to rebuild it. We don’t get to actually explore it enough.

The characters are also very unbearable. They each only have one character trait. There’s the bear that sleeps a lot, the warthog that acts as the leader, the porcupine who’s pretty much just there for humor purposes, and the beavers who are just stupid. Let me also talk about how much I hate June. She’s just a girl who has this attitude of thinking she’s better than everyone else because of how smart she is. It makes it hard to care about anything that happens to her. Also, they do that cliché where the characters find out about something involving another character and they lose their trust in that character. I’ve always hated this cliché, but it’s done even worse here. The Wonderland animals have only known June for a very short time and we didn’t get to know these characters very well. So this supposedly emotional scene loses all weight because there was no development that lead up to this point. It constantly tries to have these emotional moments, but they never feel earned. Why should we care about how these characters feel when they don’t do anything to make us care? Aside from those moments, there’s also moments where the movie tries too hard to be funny. I didn’t laugh once. All of the jokes were horrible. It’s easy to tell that this movie was specifically geared towards kids, but they can at least have something that the adults watching this with their kids can find enjoyment in.

Wonder Park is the worst movie I’ve seen this year so far. I am genuinely surprised at how angry it made me. While not the worst animated movie ever, it’s poorly paced, poorly written, and has no likeable characters. The only redeemable aspect is the animation. It’s a shame they wasted such great animation on a terrible script. Don’t see this movie. Ever. Let’s hope those cops don’t find me.

Score: 2/10

Comments

Should have seen this coming. - iliekpiez (3/24/2019)

This movie is a train wreck. I can't believe I paid to watch it.

Hopefully the show is good - Drawbox (4/2/2019)

This may have to be one of the most over-advertised animated kids movie I've ever seen. - TristGamer (4/5/2019)