Little Bear’s Big Trip review – dismal animation only good for punishing kids with
Parents of small children, here’s something to keep up the sleeve over the Easter holidays. If the little ones are behaving badly, use this like a cinematic naughty step – a threat to dangle over them. One more step out of line … and I’ll march you straight to the cinema to watch this. Honestly, this Russian kids’ animation really is a punishment: fantastically boring, charmless, badly written and dubbed into English so flatly that I think a satnav would bring more energy to the characters.
It’s the second film in the Big Trip franchise, though it really would be cruel and inhuman to sit anyone – let alone a child – in front of more than one. In the earlier instalment, lumpenlooking bear Mic-Mic delivered a baby panda to its parents after a mailing error by the stork. Astonishingly it’s same again this time with the misdelivery of yet another cute little bundle: a baby grizzly bear.
There’s a desperate plot contortion to explain exactly how the baby grizzly ends up with Mic-Mic. The little guy is meant to be delivered to America, to a political bear running for president of the forest, because forest law states that only parents can be elected to high office. This is utterly nonsensical and will be totally meaningless to the target audience of under-sixes (confirming a suspicion that kids’ films are sometimes written by people who’ve never had an actual conversation with a child).
It’s the incumbent president, a vulture, who masterminds the kidnap of the (frankly unadorable) baby grizzly. After a series of blunders it ends up with Mic-Mic, who sets off with his pals to correct the mail mishap. Said vulture twice declares with a malicious mwahha-ha that “he laughs best who laughs last”. Or to put another way: he who watches this laughs not at all.
• Little Bear’s Big Trip is released on 7 April in cinemas.