By Emilio Frenk.
Director: Ash Brannon
Cast (Voice): Luke Wilson, Eddie Izzard, J.K. Simmons, Lewis Black, Kenan Thompson, Mae Whitman, Sam Elliott, Jorge García and Matt Dillon.
Rating: Poor.
Ash Brannon, director of “Surf´s Up” brings “Rock Dog”, his third animated feature film as a director and unfortunately the results were very poor.
The movie tells the story of Bodi (Luke Wilson) a Tibetan Mastiff who helps his father Khampa (J.K. Simmons) by guarding the village by wolves who threaten to eat the animals from the village.
One day Bodi´s life will change when a radio falls from the sky and begins to hear a song from rock star Angus Scattergood (Eddie Izzard).
Now Bodi will go out of the village, pursue his dream in meeting his idol and the goal of become a rock star.
“Rock Dog” is a movie that had good moments and an interesting start but the major problem was the structure of the film itself.
The screenplay by Ash Brannon was to predictable and the problem that I saw was that for being an animated movie the comedy and jokes were missing and you need those elements for a movie of this genre to succeed. Other thing that I noticed was that the movie was more focused on making it more for children than adults and you need both things to make a movie work.
The movie was slow in terms of the pacing of the film and the quality of the animation was very poor in this occasion. One of the major rules of this genre is that the quality has to be very good so it can be attractive to any kind of audience.
I did laugh in some occasions of the film and I was moved but that wasn´t enough. Usually a movie from this genre has the tendency to succeed since the writers take good care of the story and the concept but this wasn´t the case and I felt the movie led to an ultimate downward spiral.
I was surprised by the cast of the film that features an Academy Award Winning Actor like J.K. Simmons and other names like Luke Wilson who tried their best efforts on bringing to life the characters on lending their voices but unfortunately the damage was already done at that point.
If the story and screenplay would have had some rewrites the movie could have had another result since it had potential on being a nice family movie.
With that being said “Rock Dog” is one of the weakest animated movies I have seen for a while and I cannot recommend it.