“Wonder Park” isn’t all that wonderful.
Emotional roller coaster stops short of meaningful
To say that June, a precocious 5-year-old girl, has an active imagination is to underreport the matter. Her roller coasters are like Rube Goldberg’s machines — needlessly complex but filled with awesome inspiration.
Her obsession is building the world’s greatest theme park in her bedroom and beyond — a full-scale roller coaster that begins in her backyard proves disastrous.
But in the animated film “Wonder Park,” the most important roller coaster is the emotional one. When June’s mother is diagnosed with a life-threatening illness, she sinks into a depression that casts a deep darkness over her imagination. The film, from Paramount Animation and Nickelodeon Movies, is about reclaiming happiness and imagination when it is sorely needed the most. It doesn’t quite succeed.
June (voiced by Brianna Denski) has a lot of friends, especially Banky (Oev Michael Urbas); a loving father (Matthew Broderick); and a collection of beloved stuffed animals. But her best friend is her mother (Jennifer Garner). Together, they work on Wonderland, the awesomest theme park ever, run by incarnations of her stuffed animals.
There’s Boomer (Ken Hudson Campbell), a blue bear; Greta (Mila Kunis), a wild boar; Steve (John Oliver), a British porcupine; a pair of beavers (Kenan Thompson and Ken Jeong); and the chimpanzee who runs the place, Peanut (Norbert Leo Butz).
But when Mom has to fly away for treatment (the nature of the illness is not specified, nor the place she is headed), Dad sends her to math camp for the summer. Yes, a camp to have fun with mathematics.
June, though, will have none of it. With Banky’s help, she escapes on the way to camp, and attempting to get back home gets lost in the woods and stumbles upon a nightmarish version of Wonderland. The park is overgrown with weeds and other menacing shrubbery, the sky is blocked by a swirling darkness and her animal friends live in terror of an invading band of Chimpan-zombies.
In a sense, this is a reframing of “The Wizard of Oz,” where a young girl is swept off into a wicked alternate reality, with a touch of “Toy Story” with her animal toys coming to life.
But “Wonder Park,” frankly, isn’t very much fun. It becomes so enslaved with its nonsensical plot that it forgets this is supposed to be about coming to terms with the possible loss of a loved one. It gets lost in its own Rube Goldberg machine.
June is a pleasing creation in many ways, but she lacks depth, and her mother is absent for most of the film. If it is intended as a road map for children to help deal with a potentially tragic family issue, it fails. At only 85 minutes, “Wonder Park” could have been longer if that added time would have fleshed out the emotional side of the story — you know, the part of the story that actually has meaning.
While it is certainly possible for men to make a sensitive film that centers around women, one wonders how this movie would have differed in the hands of women. All three credited writers, Robert Gordon, Josh Appelbaum and André Nemec, are men. And the director, former Pixar animator Dylan Brown, was fired during production for “inappropriate and unwanted conduct,” which reportedly included touching and caressing female co-workers. His name was removed from the credits.
Not the sort of lineup that seems ideal to tackle what is at heart a complex and inspiring mother-daughter dynamic.
RUNNING TIME: 85 minutes MPAA RATING: PG (mild thematic elements)