Wonder Park

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Wonder Park is about a young girl named June who helps a group of talking animals re-open a defunct amusement park (that all may or may not just exist in her imagination). Going into this movie, I wasn’t sure what I was going to make of it, or what to expect. The trailers didn’t really do that much for me, and the film has a 32% on Rotten Tomatoes. Those aren’t the signs the really bode well for an animated movie like this. I suppose I should start with positives, however few there are. First-time actress Brianna Denski as the voice of June is probably the highlight. This girl is clearly putting her all into her voice work, even she does seem to be the only one. From a story telling standpoint, I kind of enjoy the first 15 minutes or so. OK, they weren’t anything groundbreaking, but they were good enough. However, there’s something said around the 20 minute mark that honestly renders both what came before and what came after completely ineffective. At this point, I should talk about the things in this movie that really didn’t work at all. I can’t really go too much further into this because that would be going into spoiler territory. The jokes are not funny either. I don’t know if there’s a single joke that I can easily say works. They aren’t the worst jokes I’ve ever heard, but that doesn’t stop them from falling completely flat. The animation is mediocre. It isn’t Foodfight levels of awful. However, it isn’t Pixar levels of amazing either. The lead actress aside, all of the other voice actors just don’t work. All of them sound like they are half asleep. Perhaps the worst offender of this is Mila Kunis (somebody who actually has legitimate experience in voice acting). Overall, while Wonder Park most definitely isn’t the worst movie ever, it is still a bad movie. This is best described as movie that starts off well, but quickly falls into mediocrity and never really rises back out of it. 

4 / 10