"Rio" and "Hop"

Rio was good mostly for the character design (i.e. the cockatoo villain, the crazy ornithologist, the awkward blue macaw Blu) and the very nice use of music and ambience. The variety of colors and the Black Eyed Peas actually worked very well for this movie. They didn't explore a lot of avenues that they probably should have (for instance, what kind of relationship were the woman, the ornithologist, and the little boy in at the end? I don't have a clear answer, even in retrospect). A lot of it felt very rushed - the premise in Minnesota (why did Blu's owner change her mind about letting him go to Rio de Janeiro?), the escape scene from the plane (Jewel giving up hope and Blu suddenly getting confident). But the rest... very fun. I loved the way they designed the people - large heads, skinny bodies, which made for good expression - and the blue macaws especially, because they had bodies that hadn't been anthropomorphized in the least, and they never once used their feathers as fingers, which has been a big thing for me for a while - call it a pet peeve. The script, while slightly rushed, as I said, was, overall, very entertaining, and delivered a lot of character development in effective, tiny packages, which made me actually cheer on the characters on occasion. I'm a person of plot and while it lacked a bit in that area, it also didn't completely make me go insane... so kudos!

However, Hop, like I very widely suspected it was going to be, and was dragged along to see with my family, was... frankly, agonizing. Think Alvin and the Chipmunks meets coming-of-age story meets... well, holiday-themed movie. If anyone's ever seen an animated film on the premise of a holiday that wasn't awful, please do tell what it was, because I want to prove you wrong. Frankly, for one, the music usage in this movie was horrible. The characters were supposed to be sympathetic, but I just ended up hating them for being stupid and complaining too much. (For instance: rabbit seeks shelter in playboy bunny mansion. Gets rejected after brief misunderstanding. Launch into loud, badly timed Guns 'n' Roses - "Every Rose Has Its Thorn," no less - then cut to "how could this day get any worse?!" Yeah, sure, your single homeless night in Hollywood has been awful, especially since you're a rabbit, and god forbid you sleep outdoors). People made decisions for little to no reason ("I've known I'm going to be the Easter bunny for, what, twenty years - never mind that rabbits apparently live for upwards of forty years, that bit's not important as long as the human timeline is kept consistent - and now that my dad's called my drumming thing a hobby, I suppose I'll run away with no forethought!"). And the writer(s) did a very bad thing in telling us how it was going to end at the very ending. At the very beginning, the narrator says, "I was the first Easter bunny! Here's how it happened." And so, I spent the entire movie, not wondering what was going to happen next, but instead thinking, When, WHEN is this story finally going to advance a little and this guy'll have his Easter bunny epiphany or whatever and the drumming rabbit will achieve his dreams blah blah blah? That was probably the biggest downfall of the film... no matter how nice it looked. To all those reviewers out there who said, "it sucked, but it's a kid movie, so whatever": for one, wouldn't you like your future generations to be allowed to view something more stimulating than this shit? And for two, not even children would like this movie.