Criminal animals
I have mentioned more than once that DreamWorks Animation has become the most stylistically interesting of the major American animation studios,* more or less out of commercial necessity: their films make less money so they have lower budgets, and since they have lower budgets they can't rely on raw processing power to put things over, which means they can't compete purely on "make it look photorealistic and pretty" grounds. But they need to compete on some grounds, and starting around 2016, that has frequently involved the filmmakers figuring out an overall aesthetic that would make their cheaper, somewhat textureless CGI into a deliberate stylistic choice. But even having grown comfortable in the last half-decade with the notion that DreamWorks can get me honest-to-God excited in a way that the posher but, ultimately, flatter Disney and Pixar no longer can, I still wasn't prepared for how aggressively out-there the style would be in the studio's adaptation of Aaron Blabey's series of children's books, The Bad Guys. It is, I think I can say this with all sobriety and calm rationality, the hardest that any CGI animated feature has tried to shove against the norms of CGI animation since Sony's Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse in 2018. Enough so that I find myself at least slightly at a loss to know just how I should even go about trying to describe the look of the movie.
Allow me to stall for time by describing the story, then. The bad guys of the title are a collection of five animals who all inspire instinctive dread in human beings, and who have banded together to commit bank robberies. The leader is a cunning, charismatic fellow by the name of Mr. Wolf (Sam Rockwell), who breaks the fourth wall a few times to ask us in the audience how we're feeling about our reflexive dislike of him and his cohort, starting with a punchy, fast moving opening sequence in which the virtual camera flies around at top speed while we watch the crew execute a heist, meeting them one at a time as they execute their skill. First up is Mr. Snake (Marc Maron), an irritable curmudgeon and safe-cracker, who will be revealed bit by bit to be celebrating his birthday with this very heist - not a milestone he is eager at all to acknowledge, but his four bad guy friends are having nothing to do with his party-pooper attitude. Next is Ms. "Webs" Tarantula (Awkwafina), the group's sarcastic hacker; then Mr. Shark (Craig Robinson), a master of disguise, and this being the kind of film it is, that means that he always looks like a giant-ass fucking shark unconvincingly cramming himself into people clothes, and nobody ever notices this even slightly. Last is Mr. Piranha (Anthony Ramos), the lunatic muscle, who has unbearably toxic farts when he gets nervous. This is, of course, children's movie potty humor on the most basic level, but in fact these are Chekhov's farts we're talking about, introduced in a terrible, terrible "comedy" scene and then called back in another terrible "comedy" scene so that it can pay off at a plot-critical moment that is also a "comedy" scene, and one that I do not think avoids being terrible.
To a degree, I have to compliment screenwriter Etan Cohen for his cunning fart jokes: he has taken one of the worst bad habits of modern children's filmmaking, and given it a crucial, plot-advancing function, so that in a real way, every last toot is woven tightly and intelligently into the narrative structure. Similarly, when The Bad Guys stops ice-cold in its tracks for a pointless dance party sequence, it is right at the dramatic pivot between acts, and the dancing is itself a major element of how that pivot is executed. So yes, a hearty congratulations all around: the filmmakers got to have their cake and eat it too, indulging in the most mindless elements of their genre but doing so in a way that feels earned and inevitable, not just lazy and dumb.
This doesn't, I hope, distract from the more central fact that The Bad Guys still includes those mindless elements. I know I still haven't actually said anything about the animation, but for right now, let me just reiterate: it's cool as all hell, stylised and bold and complicated and also a little hard to start at without my eyes starting to water, but set that aside! It's brave and experimental and energetic. But it's also the shiny candy shell around a really dreadfully prosaic screenplay, which takes those five characters, adds the most routine kid-friendly comedy imaginable, and puts them through the paces of an exceedingly pedestrian stock narrative. In short, the bad guys pretend to be wracked with guilt and anxious to reform, so that they can get close to guinea pig philanthropist Professor Marmalade (Richard Ayoade) to prove they're the baddest crooks ever by stealing a famously un-stealable statue he's about to be awarded by Governor Diane Foxington (Zazie Beetz), who is, indeed, a fox. It is clear extremely early on that this ruse is itself a ruse, and that Mr. Wolf is actually starting to feel pretty lousy as a notorious criminal and just wants to be a nice, well-liked member of society, but has to trick the rest of the bad guys into helping him. And that's... boring as hell. Close to 100% of the pleasure of the robust and deliciously shallow heist movie genre is that we are watching charismatic sociopaths get expensive things they want without a molecule of guilt or self-doubt about it. They are glamorously hedonistic, anti-social, selfish movies. Seeing one telegraph "don't worry, these characters will be morally reformed by the end!" so eagerly as The Bad Guys does a whole lot to rob the film of its zest and vitality. And okay, I get it, kids' movie. But we're years past the point where kids' movies had either an implicit or an explicit mandate to provide clear-cut moral guidance to their audience, and I don't see why there's any reason to put off ushering children into the bottomless spectatorial pleasures of amoral crime movies as soon as possible.
But that's more a symptom than the actual issue, which is simply that this is pretty much constantly taking the path of least resistance as a narrative. Fart jokes, dance parties, character reveals that are obvious the exact instant a mysterious master criminal's alias is mentioned, moral arcs, misunderstandings, reconciliations... I think there's not a single beat in all of The Bad Guys that doesn't feel like it was programmed by an algorithm, and there's just nothing fun about a movie focused on cunning thieves that's not even trying to stay ahead of the viewer. It's not a "bad" script, it's much worse: it's an extremely professional script, devoid of creativity, just precisely tooled according to all of the formulas that drive such things. It is dull as ditchwater.
And so what rescues the film: the look. I didn't stall for time long enough; I still don't quite know how to phrase whatever the hell it is that The Bad Guys is doing. It's all three-dimensional CG, but there's this very weird mix of surfaces and lighting that makes it feel very different tha that. All of the effects animation - smoke, explosions - has been treated with something akin to cel-shading, so it looks flat, broad panes of solid colors that look hand-painted and inked. The environments are conventional 3-D, but it's a very smudgy, detail-less 3-D that seems to quickly blur into an impressionist field of smeared colors as it recedes from our viewing perspective. "Make it look like a moving painting" has been a dream for computer-animated films for years now (it was a primary avowed goal, not fulfilled, of 2010's Tangled), and every now and then something comes close; The Bad Guys is one of these, with its cityscapes turning into hazy, mottled impressions of spaces.
The characters themselves are all of the above and then some. Mr. Wolf, for example, has a head made out of untextured fur that feels brushed onto a solid shape rather than rendered hair-by-hair. But then, a few times, he bristles and all the hairs on his face stand on end and suddenly it is hair-by-hair. Most of the characters' bodies feel like 3-D models, but their mouths, eyes, and the lines defining their faces appear painted on, almost like flat hand-drawn cartoons were wrapped around voluminous shapes. I doubt very much it was that, but the effect is of a constant indefinable flow between the physicality of CG animation and the expressive fluidity of traditional animation, and coupled with the overall speed of dialogue, camera movement, and gags that director Pierre Perifel uses to electrocute the film into fast motion, it gives the film a kind of ultra-polished slapstick feel. It's almost too smooth to comfortably watch at times, but it is genuinely unlike anything I have seen; I could make certain limited comparisons (the painted-on faces sort of recall 2015's The Peanuts Movie) and it's always pretty exciting to watch.
Style only takes us so far: the seven main animal characters are surrounded by a sea of preposterously ugly humans, all of them with heads like smooth lozenges, and I have absolutely no idea what kind of world-building this is meant to be. Partially, that's just another script issue, but also the gulf between how the bad guys and Gov. Foxington are animated, and the banal, off-the-shelf look of the humans - and the little guinea pig scientist off in some third movie - makes it even harder to visually parse the movie than the strange mixed-media vibe was already doing. To be clear, I don't think I "liked" The Bad Guys. I am unsure if it is "good" - and I am sure that I fully lost interest in it before it has finished its 100-minute runtime. But I'm certainly impressed by the movie, and I even admire it, in a sufficiently attenuated and contingent way.
*Sony Pictures Imageworks is in an excellent position to take this title away, soon, but even then, I think DreamWorks still has them beat on sheer stylistic variety.
Allow me to stall for time by describing the story, then. The bad guys of the title are a collection of five animals who all inspire instinctive dread in human beings, and who have banded together to commit bank robberies. The leader is a cunning, charismatic fellow by the name of Mr. Wolf (Sam Rockwell), who breaks the fourth wall a few times to ask us in the audience how we're feeling about our reflexive dislike of him and his cohort, starting with a punchy, fast moving opening sequence in which the virtual camera flies around at top speed while we watch the crew execute a heist, meeting them one at a time as they execute their skill. First up is Mr. Snake (Marc Maron), an irritable curmudgeon and safe-cracker, who will be revealed bit by bit to be celebrating his birthday with this very heist - not a milestone he is eager at all to acknowledge, but his four bad guy friends are having nothing to do with his party-pooper attitude. Next is Ms. "Webs" Tarantula (Awkwafina), the group's sarcastic hacker; then Mr. Shark (Craig Robinson), a master of disguise, and this being the kind of film it is, that means that he always looks like a giant-ass fucking shark unconvincingly cramming himself into people clothes, and nobody ever notices this even slightly. Last is Mr. Piranha (Anthony Ramos), the lunatic muscle, who has unbearably toxic farts when he gets nervous. This is, of course, children's movie potty humor on the most basic level, but in fact these are Chekhov's farts we're talking about, introduced in a terrible, terrible "comedy" scene and then called back in another terrible "comedy" scene so that it can pay off at a plot-critical moment that is also a "comedy" scene, and one that I do not think avoids being terrible.
To a degree, I have to compliment screenwriter Etan Cohen for his cunning fart jokes: he has taken one of the worst bad habits of modern children's filmmaking, and given it a crucial, plot-advancing function, so that in a real way, every last toot is woven tightly and intelligently into the narrative structure. Similarly, when The Bad Guys stops ice-cold in its tracks for a pointless dance party sequence, it is right at the dramatic pivot between acts, and the dancing is itself a major element of how that pivot is executed. So yes, a hearty congratulations all around: the filmmakers got to have their cake and eat it too, indulging in the most mindless elements of their genre but doing so in a way that feels earned and inevitable, not just lazy and dumb.
This doesn't, I hope, distract from the more central fact that The Bad Guys still includes those mindless elements. I know I still haven't actually said anything about the animation, but for right now, let me just reiterate: it's cool as all hell, stylised and bold and complicated and also a little hard to start at without my eyes starting to water, but set that aside! It's brave and experimental and energetic. But it's also the shiny candy shell around a really dreadfully prosaic screenplay, which takes those five characters, adds the most routine kid-friendly comedy imaginable, and puts them through the paces of an exceedingly pedestrian stock narrative. In short, the bad guys pretend to be wracked with guilt and anxious to reform, so that they can get close to guinea pig philanthropist Professor Marmalade (Richard Ayoade) to prove they're the baddest crooks ever by stealing a famously un-stealable statue he's about to be awarded by Governor Diane Foxington (Zazie Beetz), who is, indeed, a fox. It is clear extremely early on that this ruse is itself a ruse, and that Mr. Wolf is actually starting to feel pretty lousy as a notorious criminal and just wants to be a nice, well-liked member of society, but has to trick the rest of the bad guys into helping him. And that's... boring as hell. Close to 100% of the pleasure of the robust and deliciously shallow heist movie genre is that we are watching charismatic sociopaths get expensive things they want without a molecule of guilt or self-doubt about it. They are glamorously hedonistic, anti-social, selfish movies. Seeing one telegraph "don't worry, these characters will be morally reformed by the end!" so eagerly as The Bad Guys does a whole lot to rob the film of its zest and vitality. And okay, I get it, kids' movie. But we're years past the point where kids' movies had either an implicit or an explicit mandate to provide clear-cut moral guidance to their audience, and I don't see why there's any reason to put off ushering children into the bottomless spectatorial pleasures of amoral crime movies as soon as possible.
But that's more a symptom than the actual issue, which is simply that this is pretty much constantly taking the path of least resistance as a narrative. Fart jokes, dance parties, character reveals that are obvious the exact instant a mysterious master criminal's alias is mentioned, moral arcs, misunderstandings, reconciliations... I think there's not a single beat in all of The Bad Guys that doesn't feel like it was programmed by an algorithm, and there's just nothing fun about a movie focused on cunning thieves that's not even trying to stay ahead of the viewer. It's not a "bad" script, it's much worse: it's an extremely professional script, devoid of creativity, just precisely tooled according to all of the formulas that drive such things. It is dull as ditchwater.
And so what rescues the film: the look. I didn't stall for time long enough; I still don't quite know how to phrase whatever the hell it is that The Bad Guys is doing. It's all three-dimensional CG, but there's this very weird mix of surfaces and lighting that makes it feel very different tha that. All of the effects animation - smoke, explosions - has been treated with something akin to cel-shading, so it looks flat, broad panes of solid colors that look hand-painted and inked. The environments are conventional 3-D, but it's a very smudgy, detail-less 3-D that seems to quickly blur into an impressionist field of smeared colors as it recedes from our viewing perspective. "Make it look like a moving painting" has been a dream for computer-animated films for years now (it was a primary avowed goal, not fulfilled, of 2010's Tangled), and every now and then something comes close; The Bad Guys is one of these, with its cityscapes turning into hazy, mottled impressions of spaces.
The characters themselves are all of the above and then some. Mr. Wolf, for example, has a head made out of untextured fur that feels brushed onto a solid shape rather than rendered hair-by-hair. But then, a few times, he bristles and all the hairs on his face stand on end and suddenly it is hair-by-hair. Most of the characters' bodies feel like 3-D models, but their mouths, eyes, and the lines defining their faces appear painted on, almost like flat hand-drawn cartoons were wrapped around voluminous shapes. I doubt very much it was that, but the effect is of a constant indefinable flow between the physicality of CG animation and the expressive fluidity of traditional animation, and coupled with the overall speed of dialogue, camera movement, and gags that director Pierre Perifel uses to electrocute the film into fast motion, it gives the film a kind of ultra-polished slapstick feel. It's almost too smooth to comfortably watch at times, but it is genuinely unlike anything I have seen; I could make certain limited comparisons (the painted-on faces sort of recall 2015's The Peanuts Movie) and it's always pretty exciting to watch.
Style only takes us so far: the seven main animal characters are surrounded by a sea of preposterously ugly humans, all of them with heads like smooth lozenges, and I have absolutely no idea what kind of world-building this is meant to be. Partially, that's just another script issue, but also the gulf between how the bad guys and Gov. Foxington are animated, and the banal, off-the-shelf look of the humans - and the little guinea pig scientist off in some third movie - makes it even harder to visually parse the movie than the strange mixed-media vibe was already doing. To be clear, I don't think I "liked" The Bad Guys. I am unsure if it is "good" - and I am sure that I fully lost interest in it before it has finished its 100-minute runtime. But I'm certainly impressed by the movie, and I even admire it, in a sufficiently attenuated and contingent way.
*Sony Pictures Imageworks is in an excellent position to take this title away, soon, but even then, I think DreamWorks still has them beat on sheer stylistic variety.
