The Nut Job

While it will never be mistaken for an animated classic, The Nut Job is pleasant enough for young children, and tolerable enough for accompanying adults.  In adapting his own 2005 animated short film, Surly Squirrel, to feature length, director and former Disney animator, Peter Lepeniotis, has given us a film with a cute premise, but not much imagination or originality.

The film's hero, Surly Squirrel (voice by Will Arnett), lives up to his name.  He's selfish, rude, and only thinks of himself.  He has a best friend, a rat named Buddy (who doesn't talk much, and has a striking resemblance to the character Remy from Pixar's Ratatouille), and lives amongst the other animals in a city park, but Surly is clearly out to only help himself.  While the other park animals are struggling to find enough food to last them during the upcoming winter, Surly is trying to figure out how to break into a nut store that's just opened up nearby so he can stuff himself silly.  His plans are eventually found out by some of the other animals, namely a lady squirrel named Andie (Katherine Heigl), and the leader of the park animals, the bombastic Raccoon (voiced by an equally bombastic Liam Neeson), who rules over the animals with an iron fist, and doesn't trust Surly.  Surly and the other animals are soon able to work out an uneasy alliance as they try to break into the store together.

In a somewhat clever angle, the nut store is actually a front for a gang of criminals who are planning to tunnel under the store to the vault in the bank next door.  The crooks are the dimwitted type, which is to be expected.  What I did not expect is how frequently they would pull guns and open fire, which is kind of a violent image for a kid's cartoon.  The criminals also have a "guard dog", a cute little pug named Precious (Maya Rudolph), who is easily the best character in the film.  Once she joins up with Surly and his animal friends, she ends up getting the best lines, and stealing every scene she's in thanks to Rudolph's lively voice over performance.  Outside of that bright spot, The Nut Job is pretty middle of the road.  It will keep the kids quiet, and the adults will smile from time to time, but it's pretty thin stuff compared to animated giants like Frozen.

The film is a joint effort between a Canadian and South Korean animation studio.  The South Korean influence certainly helps to explain the bizarre ending credit sequence, where an animated rendition of Korean pop star, Psy, suddenly shows up, and begins to sing his signature song, "Gangnam Style", while all the cartoon animals from the film dance alongside him.  Outside of that bit of insanity, there's very little to surprise here.  The film's premise of the animals trying to steal food from humans in order to survive brings to mind the Dreamworks animated film, Over the Hedge.  Oddly enough, that film's co-writer, Lorne Cameron, worked on this script, too.  Audiences, even little kids, will probably feel like they've seen everything the movie has to offer already.  But, the animation is nice to look at, and the film never offends.

The Nut Job is a step above recent animated duds like Free Birds or Walking with Dinosaurs, and does what it sets out to do.  The kids will get a kick out of it, but boy could this movie have been so much better given the talent. 

See the movie times in your area or buy the DVD at Amazon.com!

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