Pil's Adventures

Ashia R:

Heya friends!

It’s family movie night, and it’s Nathan’s turn to choose the movie. So we’re all waiting with baited breath for the 20 minutes it takes for him to choose a last minute movie that is hopefully NOT full of hobbits and city council meetings.

 waiting…

still waiting…

Nathan: “Okay! Let’s find out how terrible this movie is!”

So I guess we’re watching ‘The Amazing Maurice!’

..no. Nevermind, That’s not available. Instead, we’re watching ‘Pil’s Adventure!’

It’s so hard to tell the difference between all the animated churn these days. I probably wouldn’t have even realized if Nathan hadn’t been reading over my shoulder and corrected me.

Let’s just watch this movie and get it overw ith, so no one else has to watch this movie ever again. Because I suspect it’s gonna be terrible.

We open on a red panda…weasel…badger thing cutely bouncing through an old-fashioned European village.

It is cute. I approve so far.

Q is alarmed at the lack of dialogue, but I could totally watch 1.5 hours of an adorable animated weasel thing explore a live action historical museum.

Oh, no here’s a Wile E. Coyote style-scene, where we watch a cute, hungry animal get really close to what he wants and then get thwarted.

How is this fun for people?!

Luckily the rat weasel thing is quickly adopted by a little white girl with Mad Max braids. You can tell she’s gonna be brave and witty, but like in a pretty way, because of the dirty smudges on her feet, her jaunty patched up cape, and her Cara Delevingne eyebrows.

BTW – Did you guys catch her in the second season of ‘Only Murders In the Building?’ Cara’s smoky voice and that unapologetic psoriasis?

(HOT.)

Right. The movie.

[Something something something, bad rich guys. Spunky little street rat. Cute animals. Medieval trumpets and castles and horses. Insert bland copy & paste medieval scene and typical characters here.]

Baby Cara Delevigne is sneaking into, I dunno, the inner castle area of a castley thing, disguised as a short man with a beard (the beard is one of the cute weasels).

Oh good. Q should be happy to finally have dialogue in the movie – except now he’s complaining that the characters mouths are out of sync with their speech. Nothing’s good enough for this child!

I didn’t bother paying attention to why Street Rat Cara isn’t allowed into the inner castle, or why she wants to be there, but now we’re sitting through a bland scene with jesters tripping over themselves and… sock puppets.

Okay – there’s two jesters – an adult and his nephew, a kid jester! Kid Jester is using a sock puppet and his ventriloquism work is fantastic. You can’t tell he’s speaking for the puppet at all! Because he’s a cartoon and his lips don’t actually move!

Q: HOW IS HE DOING THAT?

(I’d like to take a moment here to remind you that this is an animated movie. An animated movie that Q was JUST complaining wasn’t syncing the dialogue to the character animation or facial expressions.)

Q: Is that puppet ENCHANTED OR SOMETHING?!

(remind me to take Q to see a real ventriloquist sometime, it’s gonna BLOW HIS FREAKIN MIND)

Anyhoo, our puppet master and Spunky Cara D. make fast friends and immediately overhear a private conversation between the Dutchess and the Price about a secret treasure.

Despite not paying any attention to this movie at all so far, I can tell who the bad guy is because he’s thin, queer-coded, and is giving Prince Humperdink vibes. Picture Loki from the Marvel movies, but with an even snobbier accent.

Meanwhile, the kids quickly get into shenanigans and Spunky Cara D. escapes using her superpower (Her superpower is Parkour and a menagerie of Three Psychic Weasels) into a…chemistry lab in a castle tower.

Her weasels knock some potions around and instead of running away, she just hangs out and watches the potions create something that is either Very Deadly or Probably Gives Weasels Superpowers.

Loki goes on to poison the Prince with the Weasel Superpower Potion(?) while expounding like a typical long-winded villain about how he framed his godmother for poisoning the king. This scene is brought to you via a chunkily-buffering scene rendering created in 3D Max 1998.

(Seriously, this animation is so retro-bad it’s almost a work of art.)

From here, things move fast. the prince guy (Prince Roland) chokes on the potion. Cara D. parkours-and-weasels around the room trying to avoid Loki’s sword. A chinbeard guard fats fatly up the tower stairs, breathing heavy and fulfilling our streaming kids movie quota for fat jokes.

And then Prince Roland turns into a cat with a chicken head and quickly makes a deal with Baby Cara D. for reasons I am unaware of, but that probably don’t matter anyway.

It’s a VERY logical, realistic, and funny series of events! (This is sarcasm. It makes no sense and also is weirdly boring despite all the action.)

Baby Cara D. is now disguised as a princess. She’s washed the EXCESSIVE dirt from her skin and now she’s dressed like Maid Marian with Aggressive Eyebrows. She enters a room full of people just standing there drinking and watching folks dance. Like – literally just standing around like mannequins staring at the walls. Not even facing each other.

Luckily, her friend Puppet Jester is there telling jokes. “What is brown and smells like poo? POO!” <- this is a real joke in this movie. This is how I’m spending a Friday night as the candle of my life quickly tapers to a nub.

They quickly get together and use the sock puppet to create a crowd to trap Loki (I’m unclear of how this plan works) – and somehow the Prince/Cat-Rooster has been served as a dish on the buffet line.

In another sequence of events that makes no sense, Baby Cara D. uses her two superpowers (remember: Parkour and Psychic Weasels who do her bidding at the snap of her fingers) to release some chains and pulleys and smash a wall, Matrix-motion their way out the hole, and escape via giant wooden hamster wheel.

I have no idea what just happened, but at least one of my children laughed when the wall got all busted up.

As she kidnaps (rescues?) the prince-rooster-cat, Baby Cara D. assures Guard Chinbeard (Growbart) – “I’m a princess! I’m supposed to take care of Princes!”

I mean…ew. What even are you trying to say here?

(The worst part of this movie is that it’s actually barely offensive. Which is even worse than a nice, juicy movie full of discrimination and trash. At least there’d be something to laugh about if the sexism was more overt.)

Who wrote this script and was like ‘That’ll do!’ Also who is coming up with these names? Pill? Growbart?  Gobbly? Jiggler?

Together with her weasels, rooster-cat-prince, and sock-puppet wielding jester friend, Cara has decided to enter the cursed forest to something something sorcerer something. Oh hold up – Chinbeard is coming too!

They load up the horses while Sock Puppet makes completely unecessary incest jokes, and finally we’re leaving this confusing castle situation in hopes of (maybe) better scenes to come.

Remember when we watched ‘Latte and the Magic Waterstone’? Yeah, me neither, until now! This movie has that kind of knockoff Pixar vibe. I remember being painfully bored and unimpressed, but nothing about the plot or characters. Just that the movie suuuuucked. And there were ZERO DELICIOUS LATTE CAPPUCCINOS IN IT.

Actually, you know what? Between the poor lip syncing, and the general vibe, I bet this is a European movie dubbed in English.

No offense to Europeans, I’m sure you have great movies other than Amelie. It’s just… for some reason none of your good stuff is making it across the pond to the US.

Yep. It’s a French movie. And no one bothered to create an English version for the animation. Why would you? Even the producers know movie isn’t worth re-rendering with english dialogue animation!

Everything is making sense now. Maybe I just don’t understand French humor.

Anyway, Loki and his French Bulldog are signing up for an assassination subscription plan. This entire scene feels like sitting through a sales pitch for a Zoom subscription, and it’s going on for a really long time.

The ‘hero’s are wandering through the cursed forest. Since absolutely nothing interesting is happening at this point, I’d like to take this moment to defend myself against this movie choice.

This isn’t ME forcing you to read about this French Walgreens Bargain Bin VHS movie. This is NATHAN’s fault. Go ahead and check the archives. All our most boring, painful movies have been Nathan’s choices!

This man has *terrible* taste in movies despite his *spectacular* taste in parenting partners.

Oh okay back to the movie – something is finally happening maybe.

Loki’s ex-aunt or whatever (the sorceress he framed for the king’s murder) lives here in the forest. She’s rocking lots of vaguely Celtic tattoos which feels a little culturally-appropriate-y, a crown of antlers on big hair, and lots of metal jewelry cuffs. She kinda looks like my mom, but with less piercings.

Sorceress mom immediately tells them to go somewhere ELSE to look for ANOTHER THING, but I wasn’t listening so I don’t know what it is. That was a lot of cursed forest buildup for very little Magical Sorceress Advice.

Oh, right. It was magical unicorn poop. They’re searching for magical unicorn poop. Because poop jokes.

Grobart bravely walks into the..shade? To get the unicorn poop. I guess the shade is dangerous for some reason, but I can’t remember why because I wasn’t listening and I don’t care.

This appears to piss off a buff unicorn who chases down the kids, which I am fine with because a vicious unicorn trying to murder two children is the funniest thing that has happened to this rainbow unicorn plop of a movie.

Not like ‘laugh out loud’ funny. But like ‘well at least that’s different.’

Chinbeard: “I dropped my poop.”

Jester kid: “I think I did too.” [nervous giggle]

Folks – this is the kind of witty dialogue we’re dealing with here. Maybe it’s funnier in the original French. I don’t get it because I’m an unsophisticated American with my big cars and my big macs and my access to hundreds of movies with interesting plot lines and funny movie scripts.

Anyway I guess the unicorn poop is the key to turning the prince from a rooster-cat-thing back into a human guy. Luckily, the poop has been secured. And we probably only have time for like 4 poop ‘jokes’ before the credits come to save me from more scenes that feel more AI-generated than Unicorn Land.

But unfortunately, here comes Loki, a Subscription Plan of Assassins, and his French Bulldog! They attack our ragtag team of Spunky orphan, Chinbeard Guard, Naked-but-human-now prince, Sorceress Mom, and Other Forgettable Characters with flaming arrows and are overtaken.

Sadly the movie doesn’t end there, as this ragtag team of forgettable creatures confront Loki before he can crown himself king, the ‘good guys’ apologize to each other probably, and nothing else happens.

(Aww shit, nevermind. The movie is still going.)

Whatever, it doesn’t matter. You’re not missing anything.

You know those packing peanuts made out of corn? The first time we saw them at my mom’s salon, we ate an ENTIRE box of them (in my defense, it was the receptionist’s idea, she wasn’t very bright, and I was eight).

Watching this movie feels like eating an entire box of biodegradable packing peanuts made out of corn and also probably chemicals. No nutritional value, a flavor so bland it’s impossible to remember. But it gave us something to do, I guess.

Also it’s giving me a tummy ache.