User Reviews

This is the type of movie we've seen at least one million times before. It starts out with something big and scary, some kids get in trouble and go on an adventure, they meet someone who helps them on said adventure, the one who helps them looks like he dies, the kids look like their not going to make in, some bad guys show up to make things even worse, then it turns out that the one who helped the kids isn't dead because the movie wants to keep a G rating. I've seen this so many times before and it's gotten so old. But the movie was still pretty fun. It also had a bit of religion in the mix without trying to force it down our throats. I found this movie to be enjoyable but nothing special. It's good for a rental. If you want to buy it, wait for a price drop. This movie is not worth full price. In fact, the only reason I own this movie is because I got it for free on the Google Play Store.

In the rush to get on the ark, Leah (a Grymp, an aggressive foxy-type thing) and Finny (a Nestrian, a gentle, dopey, fluorescent coloured plush toy elephant-type thing) are left behind. While their parents Hazel and Dave try to take over the ark and return for them, they do their best to survive, accompanied by an enormous slug-type thing (called, hilariously, Obesey) and his parasitic, er, parasite.

This kids' CGI film is, I imagine, good fun for smallish children: as you get older there is less and less in it for you (there is one tolerable Tetris gag). The visuals have several good moments, but are mostly unexceptional and there are some obvious areas where no-one has bothered (the vast ocean is well animated, but there is no surface after-effect following splashes, for instance). The characters are adequately realised, but generic. The story is acceptable but not classic. The voice talent is satisfactory but not dazzling (and comprised of unknowns in the English language version, not that that is necessarily a condemnation).

In short, this is a fairly cut-price offering which your little 'uns are likely to enjoy, but you may find it somewhat lacking.

The movie is visually engaging and often funny, and it's for these reasons that our 9, 10 and 11-year-old seemed to enjoy it. But the 14-year-old laughed "at it," not "with it." Here's why, I think.

While in no overtly way religious, this is a Noah's Ark story, so by definition it's a biblical story. What's amazing about All Creature Big and Small is the implausibility of it all. The basic setup is that Noah subcontracts who's "on" and "off" the Ark. The Lion - a spitting image of The Lion King, who - first decrees that omnivores can't eat herbivores. Then he gets the final say over what animals can and can't board the Ark. (As for Noah himself: like all humans, he's conspicuously absent throughout movie.) After the flood eventually comes, some on the "out list" stowaway aboard the Ark. So far, standard kids fare.

One creature excluded from boarding the Ark, Finny, is a constantly-worried pessimist while his daughter, Hazel, is a silver-lining optimist. All this proceeds entertainingly enough. But when push comes to shove toward the end of the movie and their lives are imminently threatened, things fall apart. The pessimist learns the value of trust and kinship, while the optimist comes to appreciate the value of force and decisiveness. But rather than leaving things there, the movie makers decide to moralize the story, metamorphosing the now-extinct species into one fit for the post-flood world. The problem, of course, is that evolution - at least as it's currently understood - does not affect a single generation but rather occurs over thousands, if not millions, of years.

On the surface, this deus ex machina is a simple contrivance to create a happy ending for all (excepting the villains of the story). But more deeply it seems to suggest not only that Creationism and Evolution each have their merits, but also that they are not mutually exclusive of one another. How? By force-fitting a "happy ending," allowing *all* creatures great and small (except the most minor and villainous) to survive.

The means by which they survive is wrapped up in their silly (and inexplicably previously-unrecognized) abilities: breathing under water, farting or squirting a noxious fluid, or an oversized slug turning into a whale. These creatures evolve within a single generation, a resolution that is neither satisfying nor plausible. No one we care about dies. Instead,

I suspect that it was not the producer's intention, but by fictionalizing the story of the non-fittest animals, they debase the entire argument of Creationism. So instead of crafting a story in which Creationism and Evolution could plausibly co-exist, by relying on inexplicable Acts of God, the movie debases the prior ideology while making a mockery of the latter.

The movie evades death - particularly the death of a species - in its wrong-headed portrayal of natural selection as something that can redeem an individual life, rather than that which governs the continued existence of a species. Though clearly anti-scientific, the movie might be forgiven as mindless entertainment for kids. The net impact for adults, however, is that in attempting to appeal to both Creationists/Individualists and Evolutionists/Collectivists, neither narrative is coherent.

For some such beliefs in life, there can be no viable middle ground.

When I first saw the posters for this, I thought WTF, they remade El Arca (2007) in CGI? But while that movie was funny and (due to being South American) somewhat raunchy, this one is just mediocre and boring. Our heroes are two "nestrians" (what an original name), small furry elephantlike creatures that look like rejected Pokemon/Invizimals - basically, the kind of design you see little kids draw. The flood is here, and a (never shown, guess human CGI was not in the budget?) Noah built his Ark, and the bored King lion assembles the animals for the Ark. Problem is for our nestrian father and his son, they are not on the list. So they pretend to be grymps (foxes with fur resembling some anime's mascot) to get on board, angering the mother grymp and her daughter a lot. See the similarities here already? El Arca also had two humans disguising themselves as nonexisting animals to get on board, as well as the whole "no meat eating on the Ark" thing that was the crux of that movie. They even ripped off effeminate chimpanzee butler. Here however, the plot falls already apart. WHY are a father and his son and a mother and her daughter selected for the Ark??? Did the writers forget that the point of selecting two animals each was so they can reproduce later? Enter our villains, the weird flying fox-like Mr and Mrs Griffin, who A: don't even remotely resemble mythical griffins but bats, and B: despite being flyers who could easily sneak onboard the Ark, they never even try. They just try to eat the two kids who miss the Ark and have to work together to survive. From here on, it's where the movie turns into a boring by the numbers trope-fest... The kids have to work together and of course the grumpy "I can do everything myself, I don't need anyone" grymp girl becomes friends with the clingy friendly nestrian kid. At the same time, on the boat their parents also work together to turn the boat around and learn to like each other. The kids pick up friends, the weird moss-covered giant blob with a mouth and his parasite, and learn to appreciate teamwork, yadda-yadda... All this culminates in a final scene where the movie pulls a 180 and made me slap my forehead so hard it hurt. When the grymps fall into water and the nestrians jump after them to save them, it suddenly turns out they can breathe and swim underwater... What's more, the giant blob was actually a whale! Umm, writers, really? That's NOT how evolution works. A creature won't develop organs and abilities to be used in an environment it never even visited. Or if it was already developed for this, it would KNOW which environment it needs to live in. Even if the writers are creationists, would God create an aquatic creature and place it in the middle of the dry rocky mountains? Overall, a boring Noah Ark's animal story, with a lot of chases and hijinks that lead nowhere, and characters you will forget immediately with the most unoriginal designs I have seen. The CGI was on the level of console game cutscenes. El Arca was no masterpiece either, but it tried to be innovative. This was just boring.