Since its premiere in 2017 at the Annecy International Animation Film Festival, Scott Christian Sava’s animated Animal Crackers has bounced around by various distributors before it finally landed U.S. release this week on Netflix. The depths of streaming are probably the best place for this low-budget production, which aims for the crowd-pleasing style of a DreamWorks or Illumination movie, but ends up feeling like a poorly constructed knock-off.
To start, the movie takes a good 40 minutes just to put its basic plot elements in place, opening with multiple prologues that span 50-plus years for a concept that is easily summed up by the title and poster. The central hook is fun and full of potential: The circus-running Huntington family possesses a magical box of animal crackers that turn anyone who eats them into the animal depicted on the cookie (and then back to human after eating a “human cracker” that appears in the box). But the Huntingtons, who are actually the main characters of the movie, don’t show up for a while, and they take even longer to come into possession of the magical cookies.
Based on Sava's graphic novel of the same name, movie opens in 1962, when the Huntington Brothers Circus is run by the vain, showboating Horatio (voiced by Ian McKellen) and his kind, soft-spoken brother Bob (James Arnold Taylor). Horatio is jealous of the attention that Bob gets from Talia (Tara Strong), the sultry daughter of fortune-teller Esmerelda (Harvey Fierstein), and when Bob and Talia announce their engagement, Horatio threatens to leave the circus unless they break up. Bob and Talia marry, Horatio departs in disgrace and the circus continues for the next 30 years. That’s when we finally meet main character Owen, nephew of the Huntington brothers, although he’s still a kid at this point, a wide-eyed circus fan who connects with fellow young circus-goer Zoe.
More years pass, and now Owen (John Krasinski) and Zoe (Emily Blunt) are adults who’ve fallen in love, but Zoe’s humorless father Mr. Woodley (Wallace Shawn) disapproves of the circus life. In order to marry Zoe, Owen quits the Huntington family circus and goes to work in the Woodley family dog-biscuit business. That’s a whole lot of convoluted table-setting just to get the movie’s main characters in place. After seven years of working for Mr. Woodley, taste-testing dog biscuits, Owen is drawn back to the circus by the sudden deaths of his aunt and uncle, who perish in a fire accidentally set by Horatio, now a bitter, vengeful old man.
Portly clown Chesterfield (Danny DeVito), who’s worked at the circus over the course of its entire existence (and narrates the movie), gives Owen his inheritance: the enchanted box of animal crackers. Finally, Owen unknowingly scarfs down a cracker and turns into a hamster, but by that point the movie has lumbered through so much protracted plot maneuvering that its intended kid audience is likely to have completely lost interest. There’s some ho-hum circus action before that, but otherwise the most exciting set piece involves an elaborate machine that Owen is developing with his scientist co-worker Binkley (Raven-Symone) to invent dog biscuits that taste more like common human foods (which dogs love to eat).
Once Owen and Zoe discover the secrets of the animal crackers, they’re targeted by Horatio, who wants the magic for himself so he can return to his former circus glory. McKellen digs into the villainous voice performance (and gets two musical numbers for some reason, even though no other characters sing), but Horatio is as one-dimensional as the rest of the characters, and his motivations are so grandiose (eventually he declares his intention to rule the world) that they don’t fit with the goofy, small-scale circus story. At least Horatio is sort of memorable, though, which is more than can be said for the blandly nice Owen and Zoe, or even their young daughter Mackenzie (Lydia Rose Taylor), who wants nothing more than for her parents to take over the circus.
The movie is clearly a passion project for Sava, who co-wrote and co-directed, and recruited major talents to collaborate with him in all areas. Co-writer Dean Lorey worked on Arrested Development (and more recently co-created DC Universe’s Harley Quinn series), and co-director Tony Bancroft was also the co-director of Disney’s animated Mulan. The voice cast is full of big-name celebrities who almost universally sound bored, bringing name recognition but not much movie-star charisma to their roles. Plus, the plot is still ungainly and awkward, the dialogue is clumsy and unfunny and the characters are forgettable bores. The animation is passable but not particularly impressive, on the level of a second-tier cable kids’ series.
The concept of Animal Crackers would probably work better as a series, actually, with lower stakes and lower expectations, and the chance to showcase various animal transformations in each episode. “Who cares? It’s magic,” Chesterfield says when asked how the animal crackers work, and the movie has a similarly indifferent attitude toward its plot mechanics. Without the burden of all that back story, a series could just have fun with the silly sight of Owen as a hamster or a turtle. However, the movie piles on so much extraneous narrative clutter that it drowns out its one clever idea.
Starring the voices of John Krasinski, Emily Blunt, Ian McKellen, Wallace Shawn, Gilbert Gottfried, Raven-Symone, Danny DeVito and Patrick Warburton, Animal Crackers premieres Friday, July 24 on Netflix.