Review of A Perfect Plan (2012) by Bill O — 26 Aug 2008

This movie feels like it's made my amateur 3-d artists, with a script written by an amateur. Whether that's the case or not I don't know, and that doesn't mean that amateur = bad. I'm not making a negative comment here, I'm just saying: Don't expect Pixar or DreamWorks Animation. You won't find any of Shrek's clever wit and site gags, or the amazingly diverse characters of A Bug's Live.

The animation was sluggish, the flies didn't look like flies in the least, the one-liners are weak, and the plot is fairly contrived. The world-from-insect-POV has been so well covered by AntZ, A Bug's Life and The Bee Movie that it seems the writers couldn't think of any more gags that haven't already been used.

However it is well worth taking your 4-year old, as I did. Why? Because if your 4-year old is a fan of space, this movie documents the entire Apollo moon-landing in easy-to-understand visuals with some very nice Saturn V sequences. It even referenced the Soviet space-race context of the mission. I was impressed by the LEM model itself. It's almost as though the movie began as a documentary for Kindergarteners on how we landed on the moon, and a plot involving cartoon flies was inserted to carry short attention spans better. Awkwardly, Buzz Aldrin himself makes an announcement at the end of the movie to say that "no flies" were really on the Apollo 11 mission. (Were they really that concerned young minds would assume flies did accompany the astronauts to the moon?) So I rank it a 4 just for the Apollo 11 sequences and a 2 for the plot and animation alone, averaging out to a 3. But my opinion doesn't count anyway -- the movie was made for a very young audience, and my 4-year old enjoyed it very much.