This is a Spanish-made film, so I can only assume that something was seriously lost in the translation, although I doubt it was a Pixar-level masterpiece in its original language. Still, you can tell where jokes were intended that never made it past the redub - there are moments where characters say things, then other characters hold for a frame, do a double-take, and then roll their eyes, but the lines of dialogue that go along with these moments include knee-slappers like "All sheep are brothers and sisters. It's just the way it is. By the way, when is curfew tonight?" and "You! Why aren't you globalized? You know, all puffed up like a balloon?".
We know we're in for a bad time when one of the first spoken lines involves a butterfly insulting a cow's weight. That's the joke. The pretty butterfly is mean and douchey, and he calls the cow "fatty", and it's apropos of nothing to come before or after. The entire film is filled with wonderful little moments like this, wherein one farm animal calls another stupid, or tells her to shut up, or the angry farmer who hates the Pup of the title seems to have an overly strong affection for a girl sheep. All of this in a world where, right outside the farm's fences where the animals behave like animals and the humans like humans, there are successful wolf fashion designers with hip California pads, and the aforementioned astronaut dogs.
But I'm getting ahead of myself. Back to the farm, where we meet Kanuto (Wayne Grayson, who sometimes sounds like Matthew Broderick and sometimes like the jolly British narrator of a children's TV show), a happy-go-lucky Pup who is training to be a sheepdog. Kanuto's life is turned upside down when Blackie, a black sheep with a mean streak, arrives on the farm, and Kanuto immediately falls in love with her. Which makes this an interspecies love triangle, now that I think of it, and that might be the worse thing ever (No wait, there's still sweatshop spiders drowning in urine yet to come. The second worst thing, then).
Anyway, Blackie is hated by everyone except the dog and the farmer, and goes out of her way to insult everyone she meets, until one day for reasons that make very little sense she decides she's going to the moon, and everybody better get out of her way. The details are fuzzy, but the broad strokes of her actions involve getting her and her three white sheep sisters captured by Karl Wolf, a wolf who wears a tie and glasses and har har, the wolf doesn't want to eat the sheep, he wants to steal their wool to make his cheap sweatshop clothing. Meanwhile a new dog arrives on the farm, Rumbo, a bulldog who dresses like the gay biker from the Village People and talks like the drill sergeant from Full Metal Jacket, and makes the farm animals lives a living hell.
Kanuto rescues Blackie and the other sheep from the sweatshop, and here we have our racist urinestravaganza, and then the odd couple fall in with a trio of dogs in Kabuki masks who turn out for no reason to be an international team of genetically modified astronaut dogs. They mistake Kanuto for one of their own (or he really is a genetically modified astronaut dog, it's never clear), and let him in on their plan - they have a rocket to the moon on top of the mountain, and have been trying to reach it for years, their efforts stymied every time by a murderous, glowing, pink mutant sheep named Pinky. This is, I remind you, within walking distance of a Tim Gunn wolf and a farm where humans live in pastoral ignorance.
I'll admit one thing - the end of the movie actually surprised me, probably because with no logical progression throughout the rest of the movie the filmmakers were free to just throw a random assortment of tropes at the thing and call it an ending, but I honestly did not see it going where it did. That's not to say that it went anywhere worth going yourself.
This movie embodies everything I hate about children's programming. It's not so much a story as a loose collection of unrelated scenes thrown in not because they are in any way entertaining but because it puffed the running time to feature length. It's animated cheaply, though I won't hold that against it per se; you work with the budget you have. But it's also edited very badly. Scenes continue on long after they've been dug into the ground and nearly every shot feels like it should have the director whispering "action" right before the characters start to move, even though it's a cartoon. Worse are the characters. Besides the awful Asian stereotypes and the two gay stereotypes (did I mention that the evil gay wolf and the evil gay bulldog end up together? I should have), we have that needlessly cruel butterfly, the idiot surfer duck, the farmer who I just can't even look at. And then there's our two I shudder to use the word lovers. Blackie is a painful creature to spend two hours with. She's mean to literally everybody - seriously, every one of her lines is either an insult or a whine about the moon - to the point where when she's supposed to have our sympathy at the end we just wish the mutant sheep would eat her. And Kanuto, oh Kanuto. One part bad Bugs Bunny ripoff, one part condescending asshole. He's in love with Blackie, and I get it that she treats him like crap, but the whole idea of this kind of story is that you feel for the poor guy in blind love because he never gives up on her. Kanuto is just as cruel as she is, crueler in fact, because while Blackie 's insults are more sarcastic than outright mean, Kanuto seems to always choose the cruelest things to say. It's the difference between being insulted by a deadpan comedian or Gordon Ramsay. I shudder to think what their relationship would be like.
Story - 0
Moral - I don't know, something like, follow your dreams, but give them up if they get in the way of soul-crushing domestic servitude. 0
Songs - Thankfully only one, but it is both pointless, irritating and repeated three times. 0
Execution - 0
Did My Kids Like It? The little one didn't even look up at it. The older one lost interest about a third of the way through, which is a very good thing, although she seemed almost angrily happy about the Spider/urine scene, but I think that has more to do with a fear of armies of spiders and less to do with the urine or the racism. 0
Score: 0/5, and a more perfect film to start off this blog I could not have found.
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