bbshockwave Review of All Creatures Big And Small

All Creatures Big And Small (2015)

Mediocre CGI ripoff of El Arca

[3/10 · 19 February 2018]

When I first saw the posters for this, I thought WTF, they remade El Arca (2007) in CGI? But while that movie was funny and (due to being South American) somewhat raunchy, this one is just mediocre and boring. Our heroes are two "nestrians" (what an original name), small furry elephantlike creatures that look like rejected Pokemon/Invizimals - basically, the kind of design you see little kids draw. The flood is here, and a (never shown, guess human CGI was not in the budget?) Noah built his Ark, and the bored King lion assembles the animals for the Ark. Problem is for our nestrian father and his son, they are not on the list. So they pretend to be grymps (foxes with fur resembling some anime's mascot) to get on board, angering the mother grymp and her daughter a lot. See the similarities here already? El Arca also had two humans disguising themselves as nonexisting animals to get on board, as well as the whole "no meat eating on the Ark" thing that was the crux of that movie. They even ripped off effeminate chimpanzee butler. Here however, the plot falls already apart. WHY are a father and his son and a mother and her daughter selected for the Ark??? Did the writers forget that the point of selecting two animals each was so they can reproduce later? Enter our villains, the weird flying fox-like Mr and Mrs Griffin, who A: don't even remotely resemble mythical griffins but bats, and B: despite being flyers who could easily sneak onboard the Ark, they never even try. They just try to eat the two kids who miss the Ark and have to work together to survive. From here on, it's where the movie turns into a boring by the numbers trope-fest... The kids have to work together and of course the grumpy "I can do everything myself, I don't need anyone" grymp girl becomes friends with the clingy friendly nestrian kid. At the same time, on the boat their parents also work together to turn the boat around and learn to like each other. The kids pick up friends, the weird moss-covered giant blob with a mouth and his parasite, and learn to appreciate teamwork, yadda-yadda... All this culminates in a final scene where the movie pulls a 180 and made me slap my forehead so hard it hurt. When the grymps fall into water and the nestrians jump after them to save them, it suddenly turns out they can breathe and swim underwater... What's more, the giant blob was actually a whale! Umm, writers, really? That's NOT how evolution works. A creature won't develop organs and abilities to be used in an environment it never even visited. Or if it was already developed for this, it would KNOW which environment it needs to live in. Even if the writers are creationists, would God create an aquatic creature and place it in the middle of the dry rocky mountains? Overall, a boring Noah Ark's animal story, with a lot of chases and hijinks that lead nowhere, and characters you will forget immediately with the most unoriginal designs I have seen. The CGI was on the level of console game cutscenes. El Arca was no masterpiece either, but it tried to be innovative. This was just boring.