Bobbleheads: The Movie (2020)

Let’s get this off the table right at the start.  I am a 49-year-old man with no children so I know full-well that this movie was not made for me.  Having said that, I’m not exactly sure who this movie was made for.  Are kids into bobbleheads?  Is this an item that is commonly played with?  I just always assumed that bobbleheads were aimed at the middle-aged desk jockey just to add a little festive bit of color to their otherwise gray cubicle.  What is the inspiration here?  Are bobbleheads a thing?  Was this movie conceived to latch onto the popularity of the Funko Pops?  What is going on here?

I ask only because this movie seems to be an 82-minute toy commercial, but damned if I can figure out what it is trying to sell.  I ask only because there are references to things that kids would know nothing about, like the last line of the film which is a reference to “I’ve Got You Babe,” a 55-year-old song that I would bet that even people old enough to have small children probably wouldn’t recognize.

Perhaps the inclusion of this song, and a weird cameo by Cher is suppose to mean that the movie is to be enjoyed by kids, their parents and their grandparents, but The Bobblehead Movie is such an annoying cash-grab for toddlers that I can’t imagine a person over the age of, say 6-years-old.  It seems like the kind of movie that a parent would put on for the kids while they were trying to do some work on the computer.  There are colors and things move around and it is likely to keep the kids occupied for an hour or two.

And so now, let’s deal with the movie itself.  This is an appallingly bad movie, an irritating confection, a poorly made rip-off of Toy Story in which the bobbleheads come to life when humans are not around and are treated as a collector’s item that the movie hints are the keys to riches.  Much of the movie deals with bobbleheads having to deal with unwanted houseguests, Earl the estranged redneck brother of the homeowner who plans to steal the bobbleheads to make a quick buck for himself.

That’s pretty much the plot.  It waffles back and forth between Home Alone style antics and the standard required Heroes-Feeling-Bad-About-Themselves nonsense that are the staple of Every Single Animated Feature Good Or Bad.

I wouldn’t be so bothered by this (or really waste my time on a review) if I hadn’t noticed the creative mind behind it.  It comes from none other than Kirk Wise, the director of beautiful animated features like Beauty and the Beast and The Hunchback of Notre Dame.  How far has this man fallen?  What possible motivation sparked him to want to get involved with this bottom of the barrel tripe.  Why was time wasted on a shot of an approaching dog turd?  Someone wrote that gag, and someone else put that into a computer.  I saw it, so you don’t have to.