REVIEW: “Arctic Dogs”

REVIEW: “Arctic Dogs”

November 6th, 2019

Martin Goodman

Twenty minutes after leaving a showing of Arctic Dogs, I remained in a state of disbelief. How could any animated film in wide release this year be so unrelentingly putrid? 2019 has not been a banner year for mainstream theatrical releases, but Arctic Dogs makes any one of them look like candidates for inclusion in the Library of Congress. Yes, even Pokemon: Detective Pikachu.

Arctic Dogs is the product of AIC Studio/AMBI Media Group, and Assemblage Entertainment. Based on the results, they all need to go into another line of work. It was directed by Aaron Woodley, who formerly directed Spark: A Space Tail (2007). One or two of you may remember this movie. If not, no big loss to you.

OK, the hero of this film is Swifty the Arctic Fox (Jeremy Renner), who aspires to be a package delivery superstar like his idols, three mighty huskies (who hate their jobs, BTW). He is forbidden to do this by his boss, a female Russian-accented Caribou named Magda (Angelica Huston). Swifty circumvents the rules by secretly delivering a package that his love interest Jade (Heidi Klum) is sending to a mysterious client (who turns out to be the dastardly Otto Van Walrus, voiced by John Cleese). Unbeknownst to all, OVW plans to destroy the arctic and thus the world by drilling through the Earth until he releases a noxious gas that will melt…but why go on?

This is an incredibly derivative and senseless film. OVW has a mobile mountain that houses a superweapon, kind of like the one in Angry Birds 2. Of course, it meets the same exact fate. OVW himself is as evil genius, kind of like this guy named Dru, and he has an army of minions – oh, sorry, I meant puffins – who are not nearly as cute or amusing as the ones they are patterned after. The plot to destroy the world is neither logical nor believable, and there are enough continuity errors to render it all moot anyhow.

I wrote in a review not long ago that all studios were reaching equality in technical skills: I recant that now. This is possibly the worst use of CGI I have ever seen, at least as late as 2019. The character designs are horrendous: enormous eyes tend to sit above flattened cheeks and low-set chins, and the mouth movements are frequently out of sync or crimped. Swifty himself somewhat resembles Danny the Cat from Cats Don’t Dance, but with none of that character’s expressivity or facial flexibility.

The backgrounds deserve special mention, or rather, flogging. They are not rendered in 3D CGI: most, if not all the time, they are painted backdrops. This is so obvious that your attention is constantly drawn to the disparity between the CGI characters and their environment. In one scene where Swifty is debating his buddy PB the Polar Bear, the characters look like puppets on a painted stage set. If this was a budgetary decision, then this picture was unfit for wide release and should have gone direct-to-streaming/video. If it was a stylistic decision, it is so poor as to be an embarrassment.

The only bright spots, if any, are John Cleese and Angelica Huston camping it up in their respective roles. Everyone else, including Alec Baldwin as PB and James Franco as the freaky albatross Lemmy, seem to know they will not be looked upon kindly for cashing this paycheck. Worst of is Heidi Klum, who never seems to get a grip on Jade, at times slipping in and out of an accent that seems more like hers and less like an attempt to create a character. Heidi is a lovely woman and a lively person, but animated voice-overs are not her bag.

This film cost $50 million to make. Considering the animation, story, and performances, not a dime of it shows. At the time of this review, Arctic Dogs has set a record for the worst-performing wide-release film in history. In history! Beside myself, it may be possible that a dozen other people saw it. A final note: despite the title, this film has virtually nothing to do with arctic dogs. There are the three dogs who deliver the packages, but they are not major characters and have very little screen time at all. A better title might have been: Put This Stinker on Ice.