Director: Taedong Park, Mauricio De La Orta
Distributor: Splendid Film
Duration: 86 minutes
Jungle Shuffle (DVD) – Movie Review
Jungle Shuffle might sound like a crazy dance you might pull off after one too many drinks, but in reality it happens to be a movie about cute coatis that are in for a jungle adventure. Seeing the movie is one of the many animated movies that’s being thrown at you, it ends up being just that. Nonetheless, let’s get acquainted with mother nature’s fuzzy animals in this journey deep in the jungle.
The jungle, what should be a safe haven for animals, is starting to get invaded by humans, in order to cut down trees, shoot animals or even abduct animals to perform experiments upon them. Sadly, for the coatis in the deepest parts of the jungle, humans are even out to kidnap a few specimens of their kind. It seems the coatis are a key ingredient to a formula of creating ‘super chickens’ that could be used to earn a lot of money and restore the reputation of the ‘crazy professor Loco’.
Artex, a coati that’s out to marry the village chief’s daughter in order to take the throne, presents the chief with a proposal in which he can create a protective totem to keep the humans away. The elder agrees in giving away Sacha’s hand in marriage if he succeeds in making the totem, but it seems Sacha is already in love with Manu, the village loner. When Manu screws up by destroying the nearly finished totem he gets banished from the village, to live his life in solitude.
Finally when Manu was getting accustomed to living on his own, he hears some rumble in the jungle due to some gunshots in the distance. He fears that something has happened to Sacha and decides to investigate. Sacha fears the same for Manu and decides to do some investigating of her own. Little did she know, it was a hunter, who just collected a jaguar for the experiments of professor Loco. Even worse was that she unknowingly walked in to the clutches of this hunter, as he was still looking for a female coati specimen.
Balaam, the mate of the captured female jaguar Kim, tries to battle the evil hunter but Manu is trying to do the same and they happen to hinder each other, allowing the vehicle with the trapped animals to escape. Luckily Manu, was able to capture one of the cages, that contained the small purple monkey Chuy, who is a fan of martial arts. Balaam immediately blames Manu and Chuy for letting the hunter escape and thus another conflict rises. This is pretty much where the short but action filled journey starts to free their beloved counterparts.
The flow of the story is rather fast, which is pleasant to a certain extent. Thanks to the rapid flow, the action keeps coming and this makes the move a bit more exciting but on the other hand the fast pace causes the movie to ignore decent character development. Sometimes key characters only get called by their names once, nearly at the end of the movie. Others don’t even get named at all, whilst they are key characters in the story. This makes the movie a lot less personal and it doesn’t allow you to get attached to certain characters.
Just like many other animated movies, this one does its best to add a lot of humor to the equation. That being said, the humor is not always that amusing and ends up being cliché or quite bland. When the humor does hit its mark, it proves to make up for many of the otherwise flawed gags.
Even though the character development might be flawed, Jungle Shuffle has a lot of different characters to keep the superficial main characters a bit more interesting. Be prepared to see a flashy toucan, a melancholic lizard and a one armed monkey thrown in to the mix of already described characters. The cast that supports these characters is certainly not of a bad quality but most of the actors and actresses will probably not ring a bell.
Animation wise the movie leaves us with mixed emotions. Characters such as Manu and Sacha look pleasing to the eye, adorable and the rough edges prove to be no bother at all. On the other hand, characters such as Kim and Balaam look fairly atrocious and lack the necessary details to make them likeable. Other characters often move quite statically as well as some objects in the backgrounds seem to be lifeless, even when they are supposed to be moveable objects. Other times, the graphical style does not seem to match the movie at all, for example the scenes in the water. The water looks too realistic compared to the rest but it does not even show the necessary ‘splashes and waves’ when the characters move through the water. Small details that end up being annoying, especially for an older audience.
Conclusion
Overall Jungle Shuffle is one of those movies that’s pleasing to see once in your life, be it alone or with your children. Sadly, the humor does not always hit its mark and the animations are not the same kind of quality we’ve been used to thanks to the Pixar animated movies. Characters prove to be fun and colorful yet underdeveloped. Fun to watch through on a lazy Sunday with the family but nothing more than that.
Jungle Shuffle (DVD) - Movie Review,
No Comments