Skip to main content

Wonder Park Makes Even Six Flags Look Fun


Wonder Park is the kind of movie adults who dismiss animation would point to as evidence that it’s all mindless kids’ stuff. It’s also the kind of movie that would make many of my age bracket lament the heyday of the Disney Renaissance and how far animated film has fallen since. But don’t be fooled, Wonder Park is not indicative of what modern animation is. For proof, check out The Lego Movie 2 or How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World in neighbouring theatres. This movie’s just bad!
It’s never a good sign if a movie has no credited director. Even “Alan Smithee” implies someone was overseeing the project. But the director of Wonder Park was fired midway through production over sexual harassment allegations, and the producers finished the job without crediting anyone. This however I don’t believe would have made a difference in the films’ overall quality. It was merely a portent of doom. This is a movie that doesn’t even get the name of its own park right.
The movie is about a girl called June (Brianna Denski), who bonds with her mother (Jennifer Garner) over a fantasy amusement park they created together called Wonderland, run by a collection of anthropomorphic animal “mascots”. However when June’s mum contracts cancer and has to leave the family, it causes June to abandon her Wonderland obsession to focus more in the present and act prematurely like a grown-up. While sneaking away from camp over paranoia about her father (Matthew Broderick) -in one of the only good gags of the movie -she stumbles upon Wonderland itself, now disintegrating under the shadow of a cloud called The Darkness, and she must help the mascots to save it.
June’s whole adventure in Wonderland is quite clearly a metaphor. From the start you know the Darkness represents her loss of innocence and that in order to restore good she has to be creative again and thus embrace that innocence. It’s extremely trite symbolism and not in the least compelling. But more troublesome is the message it seems to be sending by heavily suggesting that June’s fear and confusion over her mothers’ diagnosis is wrong, by equating that with the loss of imagination that imperils the park. I don’t know if the film intended this consciously, but it comes across, especially in scenes where characters are actively invading June’s grieving process, encouraging her to return to her Wonderland imagineering and essentially ‘get over’ her mum’s condition. And that’s a very bad thing to teach kids. While having a safety net in imagination during a hard time can be healthy, it doesn’t mean that being concerned and serious about devastating personal issues is not. Even children in like situations should be allowed to cope at their own pace. And they certainly don’t all need a Bridge to Terabithia kind of escape.
Wonder Park reminds me a lot of that book, though is sadly much closer in execution to the movie. It stands on the shoulders of a lot of greater works, borrowing inspiration from every metaphorical text from The Chronicles of Narnia to Inside Out. The Darkness itself quite notably resembles similar manifestations like the Nothing from The NeverEnding Story or the Black Thing of A Wrinkle in Time, merely another shapeless and ominous representation of evil. But the story is much more haphazardly constructed than any of these. It’s tonally all of the over the place (and tone deaf as pertains to the cancer stuff), making it impossible to emotionally invest in any stakes. Twice the plot’s momentum comes to a grinding halt for extended comedy sequences that might have been something fun if they weren’t so frantic. And the script is really poor, full of every cliché one would expect in a cheap slice of diet Pixar pandering to its audience. The word “splendiforous” for example is repeated ad infinitum as one of the characters’ catchphrases, as if we don’t know it’s a signature of Willy Wonka. Obviously the cast gets the worst end of the stick in terms of this kind of writing.
Mila Kunis, possibly the highest profile actress in this movie, struggles with her directionless warthog character, while John Oliver’s dialogue as a nervous porcupine consists almost exclusively of painful one-liners that wouldn’t be out of place in one of his sarcastic parodies on Last Week Tonight. Ken Jeong and Keenan Thompson are luckier to fade into the background a little as a pair of beavers, but the big blue bear visually emphasized in all of the marketing is voiced by little-known voice actor Ken Hudson Campbell -robbing North American audiences of his U.K. version equivalent, the great Tom Baker. None of these characters resonate in any way whatsoever and are little more than pre-packaged jokes given visual form. This stunning lack of personality isn’t confined to the denizens of the fantasy world, but Garner and Broderick have been used to this kind of middling material for years (a shame, because Garner can be a good actress). And June isn’t very interesting herself, despite her inexplicable authority over all the kids of the neighbourhood.
Wonder Park doesn’t even cater much to theme park aficionados except in the most general sense. There’s a figure who’s recognizably the Mickey Mouse stand-in and a few rides that are allusions to Disney Park attractions, as well as the meet-and-greet nature of the mascots. But the theme park aesthetic was not strictly necessary; Wonderland could easily have been a fantasy world more akin to the Lewis Carroll creation it takes its name from. The only justification is the visual expression a theme park provokes; but the movie never lives up to that, its’ animation nice in places, but too steeped in a Sony place of overindulgent energy to really capture any degree of wonder.
Strange as its premise is, Wonder Park might have had something if it wasn’t such a cynical product. If it hadn’t cheaply used cancer as an inciting incident, spring-boarded into an awful message about coping, and filled out with conveyor belt character tropes inhabiting a story that hadn’t made it past a first draft, there may have been something worthwhile in a movie about a theme park being an outlet for a girls’ imagination. But this is what we got instead, and it’s a lousy substitute.

Follow me on Twitter: https://twitter.com/Jordan_D_Bosch
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Strange History of the American Spoof Movie

Parody movies have been around for a lot longer than we tend to think of them. Even from the earliest days of Hollywood there were movies meant to satirize a particular subject or genre. In the silent era, Buster Keaton was responsible for a few. And in the early sound era, almost as soon as the monster pictures took off did you see comic versions of them -Abbott and Costello hosting a few. But parody movies tended to be subtle for most of cinema history, or parody came in conjunction with another goal of the comedy. It really wasn’t until the 1980s and 90s that it took off and became popularly understood. And there is perhaps a line to be drawn to the counterculture comedy explosion that began in the 1970s through avenues like  Saturday Night Live , which frequently parodied from even its earliest years popular movies and cultural properties of the time. But that is still a way’s back. To my generation though, ‘parody movie’ is perhaps a less known term than the more blunt ‘s...
Post a Comment
Read more

Notes on the Title Cards of The Lord of the Rings

It might be sacrilege for one who both considers The Lord of the Rings  trilogy to be one of the greatest triumphs of cinema and has been an avid lover of the films since adolescence, to declare that the original theatrical cuts of the films are better than the much beloved extended editions. Easily it’s my most controversial opinion regarding these movies. Don’t get me wrong, I do like the extended editions quite a lot, especially as someone who just enjoys spending time in that universe. They flesh it out more, add extra flavour, and in increasing the length by about an hour really emphasize the epic quality of these films. But I find that the original cuts are generally more cleanly paced, more seamlessly edited, and much more accessible to audiences. All the stuff there is to love about The Lord of the Rings  is there in the original versions, the plethora of new and extended scenes merely add to that for fans. And of those, they fall into three camps for me: 1....
1 comment
Read more

Back to the Feature: New York, New York (1977)

New York, New York  is a two hour forty minute musical movie largely about a toxic relationship and I understand why it was Martin Scorsese’s first big flop. Some have blamed its poor reception on the kind of movie it was, of a style and tone Scorsese wasn’t known for, but I find that hard to believe. Even after only five films, he’d proven himself an extremely versatile director, and Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore  found an audience. Sure this jazz musical love letter to New York City was following up Taxi Driver and its’ far more cynical take on the city, but then it’s also ‘from the director of Taxi Driver ’ which itself was a big hit. Was it a matter of public appetite for musicals, or mere word of mouth and early critical reception that dissuaded viewers? Irrespective of that, I was stunned to discover this movie was the origin of the titular song, which I’d assumed was much older (it’s definitely got the sound of something that might have come out of the Jazz sce...
Post a Comment
Read more