I’m sorry – you’ve gotta give me credit for giving this a second chance, but I honestly still get absolutely nothing from this movie. Yeh, it’s a little funny, but literally, my laughs never go above the “hm-hm” snigger level – and I don’t know about anyone else, but I personally start to hate myself if I do nothing but snigger for too long. If anything, quite frankly, this movie is worse than the 3 stars I originally gave it for pure technical value.

I’d love to know how many of the people who rate this movie so highly ever saw the old trilogy of W&G shorts – which, despite what my opinion of the feature might imply, I actually really liked. I mean, perhaps it’s just a novelty thing that wore off for me about 10 years previously with “A Close Shave” – perhaps if I’d never seen the shorts, these 85 minutes would be the most stunning thing I’d ever seen. All I see here is a waste of time, effort and talent – yeh, don’t get me wrong, the work behind this is great – but I’d honestly have been happier if they’d skipped this and spent the extra time making the already superior Flushed Away even better … or even, something better than that …

As to it winning the Oscar it won, I guess considering the nominees that it was ultimately up against, I can’t feel too bad – I can take or leave Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride (nothing compared to Nightmare Before Christmas) and Hayao Miyazaki’s Howl’s Moving Castle (nothing compared to, well, any other Miyazaki) about as much as this one – but to call it the best anything, to me, is just madness or desperation or both. Any praise of the movie seems to me to just be some kind of remorse that the kind of effort that, yeh, I’ll agree, is blindingly obvious in every single frame of this production, has been lost to something so average. That there are still, 2 years on, threads on the movie’s IMDb message board titled “Things you might have missed!” ... depresses me on a level that just can’t be put into words. If any of the hidden gags in this movie strike you as so earthshattering it makes your day, worse that you feel the need to tell the world what you’ve noticed – and this is coming from someone who rarely ever travels beyond the same square mile of earth – seriously, get a life.

BTW, I’m happy to bring my mum into the reviewing process once again and say, even she said 35 minutes in, “that’s the first bit I’ve seen that was really funny,” which made me feel no end of relief, ‘cos I have to say, I can’t even begin to explain how much I hate that I hate this movie so much, how much I wish I loved it, because of the fairly unanimous love it seems to have everywhere else. I know that 3 out 4 people reading this are thinking, “Jesus what a mardy bum this is …” So, uh, yeh, don’t even bother commenting to that effect, lol, I know how much everyone but me loves this movie and I feel terrible about it. Is there some kind of support group I can join? Anyone else wanna come out?

October 24th, 2005:

This is really not much different from the three shorts made previously featuring the two main characters. In a sense, this is nice – they haven’t CG’d it up or anything. On the other hand, I think of the time these guys spend on stop-motion etc – remembering that wonderful Fast Show sketch, “just … a tiny amount …” lol – and presented with this as a result, a simple comedy packed with some very lame jokes (which are fine when they’re done with tongue-in-cheek, knowing that they’re lame, but ultimately get very tiresome), and you can’t help but think they could’ve spent the time better. I think the Best Animated Feature category is limited to 3 features – if this is one of the nominees announced in January, I think we’re in trouble … If you’ve seen the trailer, btw, you’ve seen all the best bits – all of them.

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