ANI-MOVIES, *The Nut Job

Even though screenwriter Lorne Cameron previously worked on Over The Hedge, the similarly themed animated feature The Nut Job is its own separate entity as it is based on the short Surly Squirrel created by former-Disney animator Peter Lepeniotis which came out a year before Over The Hedge. Released somewhat independently by Open Road Films as their only animated franchise to date, The Nut Job is another funny animal movie with cartoon nincompoopery, but unlike DreamWorks they manage to keep the pop culture references to a bare minimum. With a trio of animation studios behind it, The Nut Job managed to make four times its budget back, as well as a sequel three years later, even though much of the funding for this was provided by the South Korean government. The movie of course decided to forego the hiring of professional voice actors and just filled out the cast with whichever celebrities that would sign up for it, even though this doesn't completely work against it.

In a small town during the 50s, a wily outsider squirrel called Surly along with his silent partner Buddy get kicked out of the park they live in after accidently setting fire to a tree containing all the other animals' food for the winter. Surly and Buddy then find a nut shop which is really the front for a gang planning on robbing a bank by a tunnel they dug under the safe. The outcasted rodents plot to making off with a huge bundle of nuts, but the power-hungry Racoon who runs the park animals sends the fairer female squirrel Andie to go out searching for food along with the well-meaning squirrel Grayson who sees himself as the hero type. Surly works out a deal with Andie to split the nuts loot with the help of the park animals. There are several parallels going on between the humans' bank heist and the animals plot to steal the nuts, and there are numerous misunderstandings as well as betrayals between all the characters, both critter and criminal. Racoon continuously plots to keep control over the animals in the park even if that means having some of them killed off in the literal nut job which comes back to bite him in the tail as Surly is one of the few ones that notices how much Racoon is trying to screw everyone over. There is lengthy chase between all the crooks in the end and Surly managing to reveal what a jerk Racoon is. Grayson is seen as the hero supplying the park with enough nuts and made the animals' new leader while Surly and Buddy decide to live in the city secretly helping Andie out, sort of like their own personal Batman.

The Nut Job is a funny enough movie which is more than just taking an old Looney Tunes short and stretching it out to feature-length. The animation is moderate for fully-CGI, although not entirely up to Pixar's level of quality. The voice actors are adequate with Will Arnet doing yet another talking animal, Liam Neeson as the corrupt Racoon, Katherine Heigl as Andie, and Brendan Frasier reworking his Dudley Do-Right impression as Grayson. Most of the other characters are forgettable, especially the humans and the pug Precious who gets unnecessarily involved and was thrown in merely for filler material. The most unforgivable sin of the film is how the American producers caved into the urges of their Korean investors by turning the closing credits into one big music video set to Gangnam Style complete with an animated version of rapper Psy dancing along with the other characters despite the fact that the movie takes place during the 1950s.