PLOT: A tame grizzly bear and a clownish mule deer find themselves stranded in the wild together during hunting season. Only an unlikely friendship can save them.
Open Season, another animated feature teeming with talking animals, is bad biology and merely okay digital cartooning.
But it does have scattered scenes of manic comic genius. These interludes -- glorious tangents into sheer insanity -- may even remind adult viewers of the glory days of Warner Bros. cartoon shorts.
Little kids, meanwhile, will probably enjoy the whole shebang because the movie hits all the high notes and indulges in every cliche in this genre.
As the first feature-length cartoon from Sony Pictures Animation, Open Season also puts another studio into the hunt for a slice of the family film market. In doing so, the Sony animators blatantly rip off a lot of ideas from those who have gone before (hey, steal from the best).
For example, there is a battling buddy thing going on between the two lead characters, a domesticated grizzly bear (voiced by Martin Lawrence) and a hapless mule deer (Ashton Kutcher). Any resemblance to cartoon characters living or dead is absolutely intentional: In this case, even though the movie is inspired by cartoonist Steve Moore's In The Bleachers strip, Shrek and his Donkey sidekick instantly come to mind.
As in the original Shrek movie, the grizzly Boog and the deer Elliot are forced into friendship by the sidekick and maintain it through quips, cracks and insults. Eventually, dire circumstances give the unlikely friendship a raison d'etre and a more solid foundation.
The Open Season story is set, we presume, somewhere in the Rocky Mountains of the contemporary American west. Boog lives in pampered bliss in the garage adjoining the home of the local park ranger (Debra Messing).
His life is thrown into chaos when he impulsively frees Elliot, who happens to be tied to the hood of a truck driven by the evil hunter Shaw (Gary Sinise). He deliberately ran over the poor deer on the side of the highway.
Elliot is now missing the left side of his antler set. So he is half a doe, half a buck. "I'm a duck!" he bleats.
Thanks to Elliot-inspired shenanigans, Boog and Elliot are banished to the wild, coincidentally just when hunting season is about to open. The psychotic Shaw, in particular, would like to add their heads to his wall of death.
A lot of the story is repetitive, to the point of boredom. Like the getting-lost routine. But, just when you begin to despair, something wild and inventive and original and funny happens, such as the intrusion of the mad macho squirrel (Billy Conolly) and his legion of nutty henchmen. Lawrence and Kutcher also generate some good moments together (although they never met during the production of the film).
Open Season is too messy, too inconsistent and too lacking in ambition to become a cartoon classic, which is surprising considering the credentials of the co-directors. Rogers Allers was co-director of the still wonderful mega-hit The Lion King and Jill Culton, while making her directional debut, co-wrote the brilliant Monsters Inc. Open Season doesn't come close to either of them.
But at least it is entertaining for the kids, and occasionally for the adults, too.
BOTTOM LINE: This is a routine animated animals flick, but there are enough zany moments to keep things interesting.
(This film is rated G)
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