ANI-MOVIES, *The Bad Guys

Lupin the 3rd meets BNA are what you get in this funny animal crime comedy. Taking break from ogres and dragons, Dreamworks decided to take Aaron Blabey ongoing graphic novel series The Bad Guys and make it into a major release. Although Universal played it safe by not releasing a metric ton of merchandise tied to its release, it did pay off by making it one of the biggest selling animated films of the year. It's a bizarre blending of Looney Tunes physics and action-comedy.

Set in a version of the human world where regular animals exist as well as anthropomorphic talking animals who wear clothes. You don't see to many of the talking kinds outside of the main cast, which mostly consists of the titular Bad Guys, a gang of thieves that have a panache for grand heists. There's the leader Wolf(supposed to be the genuine "Big Bad" one), vault-buster Snake, hacker spider Webs, flatulent crazy thug Piranha, and the sizeable Shark as the resident master of disguise. The criminal quintet is constantly taunting the police, including their hot-tempered female chief. The Bad Guys' latest caper involves stealing the valuable Golden Dolphin statue which is being presented to resident philanthropist guinea pig, Professor Marmalade, at an awards gala, although they end up getting caught. Our villains are given a temporary pardon by the fox governor and put in the care of Marmalade who vows to turn the Bad Guys into good guys. From here are a series of deceptions, betrayals, redemptions, and crazy car chases making for a fantastic cartoon frenzy.

Pierre Perifel hit the ground running in this as The Bad Guys was his first directorial debut, and Etan Cohen wrote an impressive screenplay, aside from the fact that there is the standard amount of fart jokes in it. If you are tired of cliched heist movies, then you will probably enjoy this which is set up to parody the genre, but as an all-ages feature. The character dynamics, brilliant voice acting, smooth animation, and cartoon action makes for a splendid experience for movie buffs and lovers of animation.