The Alpacat

If you're somebody watching the movie outside of Australia, I think you wouldn't mind this movie as much as the Australian audience did. However, despite atleast one of the directors being Australian, this movie feels super American. The movie's moral is simple enough, "What matters is how you are on the inside, doesn't matter if you're beautiful or not, etc" but I feel like the approach they took to achieve this moral is a bit weird. Sure, a lot of these animals aren't out to kill you and are probably just minding their own business, but kids might take this the wrong way and start approaching these animals, which can be very deadly. I hope most children are not as dumb as this movie likes to pretend they are, flat out giving the message of "we'll always be family!" ontop of a school bus because kids obviously cannot be trusted to get the message unless it's specifically written out for them. Even then, despite all this movies misgivings, the horny spiders and Cane Toads, despite EVERYTHING, sometimes this movie will suddenly become good?? Chaz Hunt and his son were honestly some of the funniest parts of this movie, especially that whole diner/pub scene. And some of the landscapes + that Dreamtime animation that appeared out of nowhere had be floored. It's like if somebody had smeared dog poo on a sandwich, but did a terrible job of it and some parts where the dog poo has not touched are still very good. It's just a shame they are few and far between and eventually you get a whiff of said dog poo again and know you'll have to take another bite. This movie COULD'VE been great, and that's what I hate most about it. I've watched it twice now, once out of morbid curiosity and once with my friends so we could laugh at it together, and we all came to the same conclusion of that it could've been great. Overall, if you want to stick your kid in front of this movie for an hour and a half, you can, just don't expect anything to really come from that hour and a half. Amazing visuals, though I thought some of the background humans looked off, and I thought making some of the "ugly" characters more cute kinda diminished the moral a bit but that's besides the point, just a super, poor story.