Free Birds Review
RYAN: I’m thrilled to be joined in this review by my niece, Gaby! This is the first big, animated Thanksgiving movie I can think of and it’s really about turkeys as relates to the holiday but aside from A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving, this is the one.
GABY: Yeah and I liked this. I thought it was really good.I wasn’t expecting it to be as good as it was.
RYAN: It was also better for me than expected. The trailer made this movie look lame and cheesy and I immediately thought that if you’re gonna do a Thanksgiving movie, why not actually incorporate the real story, or even the culturally-popularized story; and while this film does incorporate the themes of what Thanksgiving means, the story itself is just a turkey adventure of time travel.
GABY: Yeah it’s like a different, fun way of looking at Thanksgiving, in a fantasy way anyway.
RYAN: It features the voice talents of Owen Wilson as Reggie, the main turkey. He’s fine. The big red turkey, Jake, is voiced by Woody Harrelson and then Amy Poehler voice the chick, pun in tended – although she’s a turkey, not a chicken.
GABY: (laughs) Whatever.
RYAN: George Takei was fabulous as the voice of the time machine though.
GABY: Yeah he was really funny.
RYAN: The animation is decent. It’s a step up from Saturday morning cartoons and most direct to DVD animated features, but it can’t touch Pixar. The 3D is also only average, which is surprising for an animated movie, usually it’s more noticeable and pronounced but I didn’t see it throughout much of the movie.
GABY: Well the 3D was really only around the egg time machine. You didn’t see it too much, otherwise.
RYAN: The turkeys are on a mission and they basically just hop for one challenge or task to the next so the story is a bit simple and linear, for all that it goes back and forth in time. The end had a little bit of a Back to the Future moment which I liked. Overall the story drags a bit.
GABY: Yeah the first part was kind of boring and then it got better in the middle and end.
RYAN: There’s some decent humor and one-liners. I LOL’d once or twice. It skews young. It’s really a movie for little kids or to take kids to. I don’t see this drawing the general animation fan-base the way a Disney animated movie would. It would be just fine to watch on TV. SInce it’s a nice Thanksgiving movie, it might be nice to have on DVD to watch at home around this time of year.
GABY: I enjoyed the character Reggie because he kept flipping back and forth between wanting to go home.
RYAN: I loved the initial time travel sequence because it was very reminiscent of one of my favorite films – Contact. The way Jodie Foster goes into space looks a lot like the time travel device in this film. It must have been inspired by that a bit. I liked that. Unless you have little tykes to entertain now, this one is a rental.
