Calum Gilchrist
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Review: Yogi Bear
18th February
From what I can remember, I think I always liked Yogi Bear. He had all the classic Hannah Barbera magic that made it such a colourful and warm cartoon. The film was colourful, I’ll give it that, but it was just missing most things that make a comedy film, funny.
When I first heard that they were making a live action/cgi crossover of Yogi Bear STARRING Dan Akroyd, I was baffled. Dan Akroyd just didn’t seem like the kind of guy that would play Yogi Bear. He didn’t do to bad a job as the voice of Yogi Bear, but there wasn’t much astounding in the script and most of the jokes were sub-par.
I had low expectations going into the film and it met those. It was just a stupid, colourful kids film. Not really too much for people older than 12. The plot was simple enough, Yogi in an attempt to help make the park profitable fails to do so and thus the lose the park to the Mayor. I would call the Mayor evil but he doesn’t really do anything very mean throughout and always seems to be an idiot. Evil villains seem to tend to be geniuses or succesful failures.
In the end Yogi has to get the ranger to help them get the park back before Jellystone park is turned into a field of stumps from loggers. The whole timescale of things is ridiculous. I doubt that you could close a public park and get loggers in the next day. I’m sure there’s a ridiculous amount of paperwork and voting that goes on before you can just chop down a forrest in the middle of a city.
There was something I didn’t like about the 3-D either. The depth of focus was ridiculous. Things were either in focus or not. There was no sort of in between ground and it made all the scenes seem very stark and everyone stood out. But it didn’t look very natural. I think that the director thought the only way to make it look like they were using 3D was to throw everything to the max as the depth factor is all that’s really added by 3D and it really doesn’t make that much of a difference to me.
The cast was fine. I’m not really fussed about Anna Farris or Tom Cavanagh. Justin Timberlake did a surprisingly good voice for Boo Boo but that’s really all I have to say about that.
Yogi Bear is silly and not really to my liking. Most of everything was mediocre from the soundtrack to the jokes. I suppose that young children might like it, but that’s really the only people I’d say would like it.
Yogi Bear - 2/5
