Flasz On Film

The term “kids movie” is a wide enough umbrella to provide sanctuary to any number of things. And at least from where I’m sitting, it is quite important to figure out what you’re about to subject yourself to, especially if you are considering the wild idea of remortgaging your house to take your entire family to the cinema. Therefore, you might want to know if Rally Road Racers is a four-quadrant family affair like the juggernaut The Super Mario Bros. Movie, a movie for adults that kids can enjoy (like Soul and Wall-E), a movie for kids that adults won’t be bored with (like The Incredibles), or maybe a movie for kids that adults would like to light themselves on fire instead of watching (like The Secret Life of Pets or The Emoji Movie).  

See, there’s quite a lot of directions to consider here, so it might be the most instructive on my part to perhaps skim over the “what” of it all, because no parent will really be convinced by the story this movie is trying to tell or the values it wants to advance. It will be all decided on the primal level of fundamental entertainment. So, it won’t affect you if I tell you that Rally Road Racers is essentially a good old-fashioned hero’s journey about a young slow loris named Zhi (Jimmy O. Yang), who – in contrast to what the nature of his species would suggest – is not slow at all. In fact, he’s quite a hyperactive little fellow, which drives his lovely gran Bai (Lisa Lu) up the wall, because she wishes he had the patience to practice tai chi with her and unlock his ancestral key to inner harmony. Or something. But that’s not all, because one thing leads to another, some baddies turn up led by an evil frog Archie Vainglorious (John Cleese) and little Zhi must race in a multistage rally against a bunch of opponents to save his granny’s home. Oh, and there’s also a turncoat-evil-sidekick-slash-love-interest in here too (Chloe Bennet), just to mix things up. And JK Simmons plays a goat. Nothing to write home about. You’ve seen it all before.  

What matters here is if (1) you as a parent will wish to claw your eyes out while watching it and (2) if the child you intend to watch this movie with will at least make your personal sacrifice worthwhile. At this point I am simply assuming you intend to take some kind of child there with you because the only adults going solo to see movies that clearly look like they were made for children are either film critics or dodgy types you want to pay attention to. So let’s just assume you’re a parent for the purposes of what I’m about to tell you.  

Yes. You will wish you were elsewhere because Rally Road Racers is not for you. It’s not a Pixar movie designed with the whole family in mind. It’s not smart or quirky enough. It’s not a Dreamworks movie either, which would at least historically indicate there is a good chance it would be loaded with innuendo only you can pick up, while your offspring has no idea that the magical talking donkey is spitting jokes about peepees and hoohaas between bouts of funny business. In fact, you can easily tell by the quality of animation itself that Rally Road Racers was made with merely a fraction of the budget Disney would routinely dump into producing one of their tentpole gems. I suppose it’s a sad reflection of the state of mainstream animation because the quality of artistry is often directly correlated to the amount of money spent in production. The more moolah you throw at an animated movie, the better it will look because you’ll be able to afford more underpaid animators at a dingy contract outfit in Calgary with your purchasing power.  

You can’t just make a movie like Luca on the cheap using rogue indie means. Your rogue indie animation will look appropriately… rogue and indie and if you try to approximate what routinely comes out of these massive studio projects, it will never look the part. It’ll be an approximation of a Pixar movie. Hence, Rally Road Racers more or less looks like such an approximated tentpole animation that belongs in the twilight zone between Tier 1 Disney and stuff you’d find on Nickelodeon when you try to pacify a five-year-old for twenty minutes and give yourself enough space to breathe and calm down.  

Coming back to the original question, Rally Road Racers is a movie you will dislike as an adult, because there is very little in it you can easily latch onto. It’s not a movie with wide enough appeal to cater to the adults in the room while simultaneously entertaining their children, for whom I think this movie should work much better. Specifically, I am of the opinion that Rally Road Racers will work best on kids (most of whom might be boys, too) who may have just about recently learned they need fingers on both hands to show you how old they are. The really little ones might struggle to keep up because the film is long enough to test their patience, but the six-to-eights might just about enjoy it well enough for you to feel vindicated in your choice of entertainment for them. The movie is simple, colourful and engineered to involve an element of repetition little cinemagoers might appreciate, as they might enjoy some predictability in their storytelling more than other age groups.  

Therefore, don’t take that star rating you saw up top too seriously because it’s not necessarily reflective of anything tangible. For a straight-up adult, this is a one-star disaster, but a six-year-old boy who adopted monster trucks as a part of his identity will think this is Citizen Kane. However, bear in mind that the age bracket of acceptability closes soon thereafter, as my own personal ten-year-old refused to watch this claiming Rally Road Racers wouldn’t hold the candle to Encanto, which is something I couldn’t debate. She’s right. So, the three stars I gave it should be enough of an indication it’s OK to watch it and read what else I have to say about it, and hopefully to make an informed decision as to whether heading out to see an approximated Dreamworks movie with predictably anthropomorphized animals and a familiar plot structure is a sound strategy for your Sunday day out.