Alpha and Omega 2:
A Howl-iday Adventure
2013
D: Richard Rich
**********
Pros: Some slight emotionality, Improved plot structure
Cons: Bad Animation, Flat characterization, Some crude
humor
Richard Rich
has not had the most auspicious career in animation. He started out decently by helping direct The Fox and the Hound, but he seemed to
lose his way after co-directing on the financially disastrous Black Cauldron. He spent the 90’s making middling
third-party cartoons like The Swan
Princess and now he specializes in 3D Direct-to-Video features. If there’s one thing that demonstrates the
wrongfulness of the death of 2D, it’s the animation quality of cheap
computer-animated features. 3D animation
requires a lot of work and money to look presentable, and some art styles don’t
translate well into 3D environments. The
result is that many characters in these works will look very off-putting. The movies themselves will often illustrate
this point by showing 2D conceptual art in their credits, and that will look
fine. In the good old days, cheap ghetto
cartoons at least possessed decent artwork, even if it might have had stilted
animation sometimes. This problem
applies to Rich’s recent sequel to Alpha and Omega (which he produced). The
animation of Alpha and Omega 2: A
Howl-iday Adventure is not only bad, but the rest of the movie is not too
much to be proud of (despite the potential), and I say this despite being one of the few people who
actually liked the first movie.
The movie establishes that Humphrey (Ben
Diskin) and Kate (Kate Higgins) have had three poorly-named pups: Stinky (Kate
Higgins), Claudette (Lindsay Torrance) and Runt (Liza West). While the three pups are out playing, and
Runt uses a unique ability to climb trees to spot a few rogue wolves. Claudette and Stinky are separated from Runt
when they are attacked by a bear (Frank Welker). Unfortunately,
the rogue wolves have taken the other pup, and it’s up to the protagonists to
reclaim him.
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| In the wild, only the fittest get the hair gel required to survive. |
The rogue
wolves are of a pack that runs on a policy of Alpha supremacy. Their leader King (Blackie Rose) intends to
use Runt to lure Humphrey’s pack so that he can destroy it and he tasks his
daughter Princess (Meryl Leigh) with taking care of him until then. I ended up liking Princess in this movie. She clearly has misgivings about King’s
anti-Omega bigotry, and her voice actress gives a good performance. Perhaps she ended up having an Omega pup that
suffered from the pack’s policy (a line seems to suggest this to me), which is
why her personality is such. Either that
or she’s just angry that she’s been saddled with such a humiliating name.
As Kate and
Humphrey go to rescue their cubs, they experience the usual distractions in the
tradition of the last movie. They rescue
a bear cub (despite Humphrey’s reluctance based on a bad experience in their
first adventure) whose family ends up helping them in the final battle with the
rogues at the end of the movie. I will
say one thing for this sequel: it does a better job of integrating side events
into the main plot than the previous film.
The bear subplot is not only relevant to this movie’s story, it even
seems to justify a bear encounter from the original that was so pointless that
I didn’t even mention it in that review.
They also enlist the help of Marcel (Chris Smith) and Paddy (Eric
Price). I must say that Marcel’s
character design is rather off-putting.
He looks like a middle-aged man who got stuck halfway while transforming
into a goose (I’m not putting an image up on this page). I guess that’s another reason why I didn’t
like the birds in the first movie. They
help the wolves fight the rogues with a flyby poo-bombing, because every 3D
anthropomorphic movie is apparently required by law to have at least one fart
or potty joke. I blame George W. Bush. If not for this scene, I would have let this
movie get away at least a 4-star
rating. In fact, I’d say that Alpha and Omega 2 would have been a
perfectly presentable family movie if it weren’t for the terrible animation and
the graphic moment of bird defecation.
At least Equestria Girls
rescued it from being my least favorite movie of 2013.
Despite their
initial reluctance in doing so, Winston (Danny Glover) and Tony (Bill Lader,
who does a terrible impression of the
late Dennis Hopper) bring their packs to help.
They also bring Garth (Chris Carmack) and Lilly (Kate Higgins), who have
spent most of their time living in the grasslands, which I guess makes them the
lupine equivalent of hipsters. There is
an admittedly funny scene in which they fool the rogues into thinking they are “Super-Alphas”
by having one wolf standing on top of another one who is walking in tall
grass. It’s an amusing image that’s
particularly humorous because former enemies Winston and Tony are paired off
with each other. They fight the rogues
and win with the help of the bears. Princess
abandons her pack to King’s shock. I
will note that the wolf characters in the Eastern/Western packs do not seem as
well-developed as they were in the previous movie. Though there was some decent chemistry
between Humphrey and Kate, a lot of the things I liked from the first film were
not developed further or even shown. The
characters didn’t show as much personality.
The idea of her grandchild being in mortal danger does not inspire any
half-psychotic rants from Eve (Vicki Lewis), and I don’t think Lilly mentions
turtles once.
At this point you’re probably wondering what
any of this has to do with the howl-idays.
Well, after the main conflict of the movie is solved, we get an epilogue
in which Humphrey, Kate and the pups are traveling back home and have somehow
gotten lost. How they got separated from
their pack and got in danger of freezing or starving is not explained. It’s a complete non sequitur, and its only connection to the plot is that Runt uses
his foreshadowed climbing ability to spot a potential place to rest. It’s like they decided to make the movie
holiday-themed at the last second. They
find the same gas station from the previous movie (which I also don’t think I
mentioned). Max, a worker who mistook
Humphrey for rabid in the previous film, sees the wolves and, being reminded of
his own family, decides to leave the house open and with food waiting for them
because it’s Christmas. The scene has a
lot of heart, but I’m not sure why he didn’t call animal control or someone who
would have known what to do.
Alpha
and Omega 2 had good potential and a promising plot, but some things
brought movie down: the crude scatological humor, the tacked-on ending and,
most of all, the animation. It’s a remarkably ugly movie in a visual sense. Like many cheap third-party 3D movies, the
imagery lacks a crucial amount of detail, the movement has an awkward feel to
it and it’s clear that many of the designs didn’t translate well into a
three-dimensional environment. The color
palette of the movie has an unintentional weird, low-saturation look to it, and the shading is terrible. Particularly bad are the wolf pups, whose
cuteness the artists went a little overboard with.
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| There's no room for their brains. |
Voice acting isn’t as good either, as very few of the
original cast returned to reprise their roles.
The most noticeable exception is Danny Glover. Perhaps this is the best he could get because
people might be realizing that Glover is so blandly wooden an actor that he
makes Russell look like Jim Carrey. He
does have a distinctive voice which arguably makes phoned-in voice acting his
ideal niche. The one most noticeable
advantage this movie has over its predecessor is that it makes far better use
of its scenes. If feels like it has more
substance in its scant 45 minutes than Alpha and Omega had in twice that time. It might have even been an improvement if not
for its fatal flaws. This movie wasn’t
much to review, but I guess that’s what I get when I commit myself to a gimmick
like this.
QUOTES
KATE: Okay, parents’ first dinner. Let's get this place in order. Oh Humphrey,
can you move the logboard to the wall?
HUMPHREY: This is where we fell in love.
KATE: I know.
Against the wall. [Humphrey pushes
log slightly] Completely against
the wall.
HUMPHREY: I don’t
know, honey. I think the angle makes it
a little less…[Kate pushes log against
the wall]…militant?
PRINCESS: Why aren’t you eating the rest? Don’t you know how scarce meat is?
RUNT: I was leaving the other half for you. You know, like sharing. Nah, I guess it’s an Omega thing.
PRINCESS: When we have a kill, those who eat are those
who fight for it.
RUNT: I’m sure the pups do really well under that
scenario.
PRINCESS: [growls]
The Alpha pups do.
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