Barnyard

This being the digital age and everything goes fast, it took only a couple years before studios dumbed their new toy digital animation down to the Hanna-Barbera level. That is, shitty, schlocky, and lazy as a Texan stripper in August. As long as Pixar makes buttloads of cash with their movies, there will be some dumbass in some shitty studio thinking anyone with a computer can do the same. They figure it's not the writing or directing, or the time and care put into the details that makes good movies profitable. Hell, no. It's talking animals. Animals that act like people are way the fuck better than a good script.

Barnyard is a low point for digital animation, and an even lower one for anthropomorphosis. That's saying a lot because every unimaginative grassfucker is dying to make a shitty movie with talking goats, not for the sake of storytelling, but for the sake of lunchboxes, Happy Meals and pillowcases. This is one bad, bad, bad fucking movie.

I didn't want to see Barnyard, but it was the only thing playing at the 88 Drive In and Worm asked me to tag along as the third wheel on his blind date. After meeting a Filipino lady on the Internet and arranging to meet her for real, he got sort of skeeved about her Samoan boyfriend. I guess I was supposed to be the muscle in case the shit hit the fan. To be honest, though, I would have been out of the bed of his pickup faster than a greyhound if any big, scary guys came around. I was just there for a free movie, an Alien Glowpop and to try to score a free look if things got hot and heavy between Worm and his new lady friend.

I wish they had screwed instead of fighting the whole time about the porn Worm keeps in his glovebox. That would have been so much more entertaining. And creepy, too. Instead, it was them in the cab, and me in the back with a burlap sack to keep off the mosquitos, watching a shitty, shitty, shitty movie.

Uberhack writer/director Steve Oedekirk is responsible. He's made such hot drippers as Kung Pow: Enter the Fist and a bunch of unfunny bad parodies starring his thumb. He can suck the life and soul out of anything with his generic gags. What he does very well is write jokes that look like jokes to people who don't know the difference between funny and unfunny. Which describes most of the grassfuckers in Hollywood. They don't know comedy from what falls out of their asses, explaining why we so often see what falls out of their asses. All they recognize is the formula. "Oh, yeah, I see. That's a joke, right?" A bad writer then tells them, with conviction, "Yeah! And it's superfunny!"

Sold!

I don't see any other way Barnyard got made because there isn't a single moment of genuine, original comedy in it. There isn't even an original plot. It's a dumbed-down version of The Lion Kingwhich was already a pretty stupid version of Joseph Campbell's reluctant hero horseshit. It's the sort of script writtenand produced by people who don't really understand story, or comedy, or pathos, but just really want to make money.

Here, a boy cow Otis, with an udder, wants to party all the time, but whose father tells him he needs to watch after the farm and protect it from coyotes. "I don't want to, Dad. That's not me." Of course, the coyotes kills his father, who also has an udder, and whose death is oddly bloodless for someone devoured by five mangy canines. That death turns the lightbulb on in Otis's head, along with some vague love interest in a pregnant girl cow, with an udder, who isn't as fat as him, so I have no idea how we're supposed to be able to tell which is which.

The movie doesn't evolve or develop, really. The plot turns on schmaltz and cornpone. Lazy, lazy storytelling that expects the viewer to buy into it because they've seen someone already do the same thing better. There is an overlong gag where Otis protects the farm from a fat, rude kid and--haha--drives a car. Then of, course, a showdown with the coyotes where Otis tries to be brave and then is helped by the rest of the farm animals. Finally, he unites with the pregnant cow. It all happens on a schedule, not naturally.

The story exists for the gags. And the gags suck. They are old and tired, but they were born that way. Obvious, dumb and crass. It's shit like a nosy neighbor who gets her comeuppance, and the fat, rude kid who gets his, and 2,000 examples of animals acting like people. They play dice, and dance and sing. They golf and sit in lounge chairs, and when Otis jumps into a pond he yells "Manabunga!" Get it? Wasn't that not funny?

The animation is as uninspired as a Barbara Cartland novel. Especially all the ones she's written since she died. Everything is flat and lacks detail. The animals are generically cartoonish. Most have no personality, and those that do are stereotypes. Some are unidentifiable, like a yellowish weasel(?) who keeps imagining the hens as fried chickens (clever!). The setting comes from the people whose knowledge of agriculture came from the Berenstain Bears.

Barnyard is a pile of shit. Top to bottom, lazy, unoriginal horseshit, pigshit and bullshit. I'm not just saying that because the back or Worm's truck is uncomfortable and filthy, or because the mosquitos got me. I'm saying that because I fucking hate greedy assholes who put this shit out there expecting kids to be stupid enough to consume it just because it vaguely resembles something good. Hell, even I'm not that stupid. One Lousy Finger. I wish I could give it two, just so I could jam them in Oedekirk's eyes.