Wonder Park Review: Hollow Film, TV Setup — Full Breakdown & Transcript

[00:00] So, there's this movie that just came out called Wonder Park. In January 2018, the director of Wonder Park was fired for allegedly sexually harassing co-workers,

[00:13] and rather than just hire a competent director or even another director to replace him, the producers opted to just not do that.

[00:25] Now, for animated films, this isn't super strange. I mean, it's a little strange, but it isn't incomprehensible. Animated movies are basically made in slow motion,

[00:40] so it's entirely possible for a movie to be basically at a point where the movie is kind of done long before it's actually finished.

[00:53] Like, the movie's being storyboarded, and the animatics are done, and all the voice work is done, and there's even basically a rough edit of the film, and now it's just in the slow, grueling process of actually finishing it.

[01:07] At that point, the creative leads can pretty much just be left to their own devices to figure it out themselves. They're probably all, you know, competent, creative individuals who are capable of, like,

[01:19] solving problems and making decisions and reaching a consensus. And if they do hit any sort of creative, impassable roadblock where some executive decision needs to be made,

[01:34] well, you know, the producers are still there, and that is literally the producer's job. So you get to the end of Action Park, and there's no director credit. Like, it's not left blank.

[01:47] It's just, it's not there at all. It is entirely absent. That said, it's super obvious that Wonder Park is a movie with no credited director because the big thing it lacks is direction.

[02:02] It is, in a word, insubstantial. If you took My Neighbor Totoro and Inside Out and the prologue of Up, and you just took those movies and you stuck them in a blender and you liquefied them,

[02:18] and then you took that and dumped it into a swimming pool, and then you took an eyedropper of the pool water, that would be this movie.

[02:31] This movie is the homeopathic version of Inside Out. Now, before going into it, I heard that this movie was going to be, like, right up my alley, that it was yet another movie that attempts to mix childish whimsy with grim, heavy story,

[02:50] and boy was I disappointed. I actually watched The Monster Calls a few hours earlier in preparation just to, like, calibrate my internal instruments,

[03:03] and it turned out it wasn't needed because there is nothing there. A Monster Calls, if you're not familiar with it, is a 2016 drama about a boy who retreats into fantasy to try and cope with his mother's terminal cancer.

[03:20] It's a beautiful film, and it's gut-wrenching. It's a really complex and nuanced story about confronting death, and the way that stories and fantasies can be a distraction from facing reality,

[03:33] but they can also be a huge aid in helping us process difficult emotions in helping us rationalize complicated things like grief and anger and guilt Fantasy films about kids dealing with sick or dying

[03:50] parents is actually a whole subgenre unto itself. For your older teens and adults, you've got I Kill Giants. For your tweens and up, you've got A Monster Calls. And for all ages, there's My Neighbor Totoro.

[04:03] Wonder Park is technically the same genre, but only technically. There is a mom who gets sick and needs to go away, so she does,

[04:16] and then she's back at the end. And the rest of the movie just kind of happens in between those two points. Like, there's a lot of disconnected problems here, so let's make a list.

[04:31] One, the setup is overly complicated. So the setup is that this young girl, June, and her mom create Wonderland as a collaborative bedtime story,

[04:43] with June's stuffed animals filling the role of mascot, staff, and host. Her stuffed monkey, Peanut, is the Mickey Mouse-type ringleader who magics the rides into existence.

[04:56] And yes, I said Wonderland. The park in Wonder Park is called Wonderland, and they repeat this over and over. You are the wonder in Wonderland. In the interior fiction of Wonderland, Peanut is the creator who manifests Wonderland via ideas that he receives,

[05:17] whispered on the wind, when June's mom whispers June's ideas into the stuffed animal Peanut's ear. Look, I know it's a lot of steps, but they spend a lot of time in the movie itself negotiating the process,

[05:32] because after Mom gets sick and goes away, it's the fact that June doesn't feel right whispering ideas into Peanut's ear that's the thing that causes her to abandon Wonderland.

[05:46] Backing up a bit, before June's mom gets sick, June actually builds a makeshift roller coaster in the backyard out of fencing and a wagon, and the ensuing chaos ends up demolishing a bunch of the neighborhood

[06:01] and almost gets June killed. So after that, June and her mother start building Wonderland as clockwork miniatures,

[06:13] this sprawling clockwork miniature that ends up taking over most of the house. because then June's mom gets sick and has to go away for treatment, and June packs up Wonderland and becomes overly protective of her dad and his health,

[06:29] and at this point the movie still isn't done setting up, because dad then sends June off to mass camp, but on her way there she, like, has a panic attack.

[06:42] She imagines this scenario where her dad is going to, like, eat pizza and drink beer all summer and get fat and lazy, and if he doesn't have a heart attack, he's going to light the house on fire or explode or something.

[06:57] So she imagines this elaborate scenario and convinces herself that she needs to go home, and so she creates a catastrophe on the bus forcing the bus to stop and giving her an opportunity to sneak away and take the hiking trails back home Then finally as she walking through the forest she comes across the magical abandoned ruins of Wonderland and the movie properly starts

[07:27] So Wonderland, as she finds it, is in disrepair because she stopped imagining it, so she needs to rekindle her imagination and fix the park to save it from the darkness.

[07:39] All right, issue two. The character designs are boring. So, Fantasy Wonderland is staffed with magical talking versions of June's stuffed animals, but these characters are really unmemorable in their designs,

[07:53] both in terms of being characters in a Nickelodeon film that will no doubt lean heavily on merchandising, and also in terms of being the mascots of a fictional theme park.

[08:06] The only one that has any flair is Boomer the Bear, who is blue, and that's it. He's still otherwise just a bear, but he's blue.

[08:19] Otherwise, they're all just generic cartoon animals. Three, the camera work is chaos. The three things that this movie really loves are extreme high angles,

[08:31] extreme wide-angle lenses that are super close up, and completely unmotivated movement that just spins everywhere. It's the kind of shot that animators like to block

[08:44] because it's complicated and it gives them a chance to show off, but then it happens so often and it's so repetitive that it starts to feel like showing off. Like, it happens often enough that it's calling attention to itself,

[08:58] and it starts to feel almost like the director was fired and then the animators were just left to their own devices without direction for a year. for the main conflict isn't really the main conflict.

[09:12] It's actually really unfair to compare this movie to something like A Monster Calls because it's not really about June dealing with her mother's illness. June's mother's illness isn't the thing that the movie is about.

[09:27] It's just the thing that happens after the start of the movie, but before the rest of the movie. The conflict in Wonderland doesn't really have anything to do with it or how June is handling it.

[09:42] Really, the story is a post-apocalyptic action-adventure zombie movie in a decrepit theme park. Then, tacked onto that, you have a token, ill-defined, generic sort of

[09:56] don't-let-the-spark-of-creativity-die type message to kind of tie it all together. So Wonderland is being devoured by the darkness, a storm cloud vortex hovering over the park that has infected the park's signature toys, turning them into an army of chimpanzees that are demolishing the park and taking the wreckage and hurling it up into the vortex of the darkness.

[10:30] June defeats the darkness when she finds the personal will to whisper ideas into Peanut's ear, allowing him to then manifest them into the world of Wonderland,

[10:44] and they use that to then turn on the park again so that they can just reset everything. But then there still a small remnant of the darkness hanging over the park of all the movies Wonder Park wants to be it wants most of all to be inside out so that why you have this weak nod to the idea that being sad

[11:09] isn't always a bad thing. Five, this is just the setup for the TV show. That's the reason any of this exists, and it's also the reason it exists the way that it exists.

[11:23] The movie doesn't really matter, it's just laying the foundation for the Nickelodeon series that is already in production. I mean, that's why the setup is so complicated and also so insubstantial.

[11:35] They're just seeding ideas that they can come back to in the TV show. It's also probably why the characters are so bland. The animals are really simple and basic, specifically so that the models will play nice in a simplified television rendering pipeline.

[11:50] It's also why Dune doesn't really need to deal with any meaningful character growth beyond establishing the perpetuity of Wonderland. It's why they didn't bother replacing the director.

[12:02] It doesn't matter. The movie was always just the precursor to the TV show, so it doesn't need to be good or coherent, it just needs to exist.

[12:14] Even the cloud of darkness lingering in Wonderland at the end feels less like a meaningful resolution and more like a plot seed. Like, all right, here's our antagonist generator that show writers can use whenever they need

[12:27] to explain why something in Wonderland is broken or misbehaving. Funny enough, this is actually kind of the opposite of those movies, like where a monster

[12:39] calls and I kill giants and to a degree the sort of magical realism of My Neighbor Totoro are about people retreating into fantasy in order to deal with or cope with or rationalize

[13:00] something in their life, but in Wonder Park, June doesn't retreat into fantasy to deal with her mother's illness. It's the opposite. She rejects fantasy and becomes too practical

[13:16] and needs to rediscover imagination, but she doesn't need to rediscover imagination to

[13:29] cope with her mother's illness. She just needs to rediscover imagination because her sadness is eating the park. For the purpose of the film, it doesn't really matter why June

[13:42] is sad and the validity of that is never explored. Mom's illness could have been replaced with anything. It doesn't matter that she's sick. We don't address the fact

[13:55] that she's sick and how June relates to that, how she processes it. All that matters is that there is an interruption of some kind. So the validity of June's sadness, it's not brought up at all.

[14:11] In fact, it's so not relevant that the animals blame June for wrecking the park because she created the darkness, and the movie is just like,

[14:23] yeah, you know what? It is kind of her fault for getting sad. She should have thought about how her sadness would make other people feel. which I don't know about you but that's a great message for children