Dr Lenera
Posts: 3447
Joined: 19/10/2005
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As usually happens with any animated movie these days that isn’t Pixar, Gnomeo and Juliet has had mainly average reviews but the audience I saw it with, full of kids and adults, loved it and rightly so, this is a terrific audience pleaser, terrific fun from beginning to end. Of course the story of Romeo and Juliet has had countless cinematic telling and has been adapted in many ways, so perhaps we don’t need another version, but it was a stroke of eccentric genius to use garden gnomes this time [I can only one think of one other gnome film,the animated The Gnome Mobile.] The basic story is there, and the writers cleverly have it both ways by having Shakespeare tell the proper ending [you’ll see what I mean] and giving us the happy ending films like this require to send the audience out smiling. Complaints by purists are ridiculous and narrow minded-this is a perfect way to introduce young kids to the Bard. This is filled with funny scenes, and I personally haven’t laughed so much at a new film in ages, though at times it’s more like a Dreamworks film, despite Disney partly producing, with lots of pop culture references and gags aimed at adults. Now the critics don’t like this kind of thing, but sod them, I thought they all worked in this movie except maybe for a Matrix bullet time bit, which has been seen in too many films. Despite all the irreverence, the central romance is sweet and gives proceedings an emotional centre- I cared far more about it then the romance in Tangled. Technically this is superb, with the gnomes looking and sounding like actual solid garden gnomes, and although I don’t especially like Elton John, his songs do work in the picture and are cleverly adapted into the score. There’s a flashback which copies Toy Story 2 but isn’t nearly as poignant, and I didn’t think enough was done with the Ozzy Osbourne-voiced Fawn-I kind of expected more Donkey from Shrek-though overall the voice cast were great. I don’t care what anyone says, I enjoyed this more than any other of this year’s films so far, and I doubt there’ll be a better animated movie for quite a while.
9/10
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check out more of my reviews on http://horrorcultfilms.co.uk/
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