Norm of The North

Well...you asked for it! I know, I've been very inconsistent with posting on this blog, but personal stuff, school, life yadda yadda yadda, you've heard it all before, so how about I make up for it by reviewing one of the worst reviewed animated movies in recent years? No, there weren't any behind the scenes facts I could find and to be frank, who the hell cares about knowing stuff that happened in a writers room full of brain-dead monkeys? Let's just dive into this pile of crap so I can get it out of my system!

Story: ROB SCHNEIDER IS A POLAR BEAR...and obligatory South Park joke out of the way because that's what this movie feels like: A "child friendly" version of South Park without any intelligence in it's story, humour (which I say VERY loosely) and basic concepts of filmmaking. With an obnoxious and convoluted environmental message which makes Ferngully look subtle in comparison, all it will do is either make you cringe or question how the fuck it was greenlit in the first place! With such a slow pacing that I was done after the first two minutes (literally), this has no concept of characterisation, let alone development, leaving me completely uninvested in what was going on. On top of the awful humour (which I'll get to in a minute) and obnoxious environmental message, it decides to pad out the running time with action scenes which have no suspense and random dance party scenes with no purpose whatsoever. It's "humour" is more bottom of the barrel than all the Happy Madison movies combined up to the point that Adam Sandler would reject every single joke. In fact, it almost felt saddening watching how desperate the writers were in wanting to make the audience laugh. From pissing Lemmings for 30 goddamn seconds, to obligatory farting, to stupid pop culture references which will instantly date the movie, even the youngest of children would hate it all! And this is on top of the unbelievably lazy cliches which you can already predict when looking at the bloody poster! I'm sorry I don't have much to say about the plot, but this movie should've fallen into the so bad its entertaining category, but this is really so bad, it's not even worth getting angry over.

Animation: I'm not kidding when I say that I haven't seen animation for a film in cinemas this bad since Happily N'Ever After. And I don't care that it was originally meant to be direct to DVD because even by those standards, this would've been crap. The character designs are atrocious with the humans looking like unfinished models with disgustingly caricatured features and the animals looking like the Coca Cola polar bears' derpy cousins. It almost feels like they were designed by a professional for a Lidl rip-off cereal box, and then the animators were told to recreate them in the dark! And to add salt on an open wound, the textures and character animation on everybody leaves them looking and feeling so clunky and unnatural, especially with Mr Greene. The textures and rendering are also atrocious to the point of being intolerable, making it look worse than a PS1 cutscene with awkward and vomit-inducing camera movements and editing. By the way, remember when The Secret Life of Pets' depiction of New York City was beautiful in it's detail with the architecture, scale & atmosphere? Well, this waters New York down to the most generic metropolitan city without any effort to make it distinguishable. And the same goes for the Arctic with the plain white ice and waters, which pale in comparison to Frozen's incredible eye for detail. And keep in mind that this was made in 2016. 2016. The same year that freaking Zootopia, Moana and Finding Dory were released! This is the kind of animation which would've been bad during infancy of CGI, let alone CGI animated movies.

Characters: Norm (Rob Schneider) immediately fails as the protagonist because his motivations and personality are either obnoxious or convoluted. All he does is twerk his ass off to the Arctic Shake, constantly change his mind over his opinions on humans, shove the environmental message down our throats and show why he's such an unfit choice to be the next king. Add in sidekick Lemmings who are the most crass Minion rip-offs (who themselves have become too over-hyped) who should've thrown themselves off a cliff the millisecond they appeared on-screen yet the writers were under the delusion that they would be franchise-worthy merchandise. (Heather Graham) has no personality other than being a moron for thinking that advertising dangerous polar bears would convince people to buy houses in the Arctic. Her daughter, Olympia, is just a generic smart kid who wants her mommy to stop working so hard and to hammer down the SAVE THE ARCTIC message if we didn't get it already. Mr. Greene (GET IT?!) (Ken Jeong) is supposed to be a goofy yet intimidating villain, yet he fails in both traits because all he does is move around like a noodle and never explain his nonsensical motivations for upping his approval rating to sell houses in the Arctic. There's no point discussing Elizabeth the love interest because she has no screen time, let alone personality, for us to know her. Then again, when you're forced to be a romantic interest for a Rob Schneider character, animated or not, you'd probably want to stay as far away from him and the camera as possible. Socrates (Bill Nighy. Yes. Bill. Fucking. Nighy) serves no purpose other than 'motivating' Norm to go to New York which really made me wish I was watching Arthur Christmas so Nighy's talents weren't wasted for an easy paycheck. And speaking of acting, watching this made me feel sorry for almost every voice actor involved when wasted time which could've been spent on much better projects instead of this nonsensical mess. Why almost? Well, given Rob Schneider's tendency to make crap even worse with his racial insensitivity and obnoxiousness, it's about bloody time he sank even lower than the South Park memes. Anyway, I don't care about the rest of the characters like the wise grandpa, Gabriel Iglesias polar brother bear, Oprah rip-off host and New York civilians because they contribute even less to the proceedings. It's almost amazing how an entire group of writers managed to come up with the most brain dead, annoying and obnoxious characters I've ever seen in an animated movie.

Watching this movie made me question what the fuck I'm doing with my life. Norm of the North is easily the worst animated environmental movie with a painfully obnoxious environmental message which makes no sense, animation which will make children wish the ice caps would melt and characters who are as likeable as being mauled by polar bears. Was this as bad as Happily N'Ever After? Well...it's definitely in the same league in terms of it's badness, but I admittedly have fun being enraged at every single thing wrong with Happily N'Ever After. With Norm of the North however, it just left me depressed and bored. I went into this knowing how bad it was, and it gave me exactly what I expected: a movie which should only be used to torture your children. That's my only recommendation for this, actually. Parents, if you want to punish your kids, just show them this.
Story: ⭐
Animation: ⭐
Characters:⭐
Overall: 😡