"The Wild Life" is a loose adaptation (no cannibals, no slave trade), and suggests (humorously) that Crusoe perhaps was not the paragon of self-reliance that his reputation claims. The film tries to pack in a little bit too much in its running time, and there isn't a comedic moment until well into the film, a strange choice in a movie for kids, but "The Wild Life" has its moments of charm, hilarity, and slapstick that worked really well at the 2D screening I attended, a screening packed with kids. ("The Wild Life" will be released in both 2D and 3D.)
Before Crusoe's arrival, the island is an untouched paradise. The animals live together, gather food together, and get each other out of scrapes. The leader is Mak (David Howard), a colorful parrot who senses a wide world is out there beyond the ocean and he wants to see it. There's a sassy emotional tapir (Laila Berzins), a chameleon with a formal Shakespearean voice (Colin Metzger), a squeaky-voiced kingfisher (Lindsay Torrance) who wishes Mak would be happy where he is. A couple of other creatures—an echidna, a blind goat—round out the group. When a ship crashes into the island during a terrible storm, and a gangly man and his dog emerge onto the shore, the animals peek at him from their perches, fascinated. They think he's a new species and find him vaguely terrifying. Mak, though, feels vindicated. He always knew that the island wasn't all there is!
Crusoe (Yuri Lowenthal) begins his struggle for survival, and the animals make tentative advances. Before you know it, the animals help him build his treehouse and his lookout tower, problem-solving and working together, and Crusoe's created world has become a Utopia, an ideal society. Unfortunately, two scrawny cats (Debi Tinsley, Jeff Doucette) have also emerged from the shipwreck, and crouch from the cliffs above, looking on the happy communion below, vowing to get their revenge on ... anyone who is happy. The cats sneer and scheme like the Macbeths, the "wife" a murderous powerhouse, egging on her more reluctant (and, in the film, stupid) "husband." The cats are agents of chaos and destruction, interrupted only by the wife giving birth to a litter of unpleasant villainous kittens. The film features some pretty violent moments against those cats: they are thrown across a room on the ship, thrown down the stairs ... it's actually rather brutal, whether they are villains or not.
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