INTO THE STARS

FUELED BY CANDY BARS,

RIDES A KID WITH A KNACK FOR INVENTION

WITH A SUPERPOWERED MIND

A MECHANICAL CANINE *bark bark*

RESCUES THE DAY FROM SURE DESTRUCTION

Too bad being smart doesn’t win you an Oscar! Sorry, Jimmy!

The 74th Academy Awards introduced a big change to the ceremony in the form of a brand new category: Best Animated Feature. This is the one and only category that Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius, the backdoor pilot disguised as a movie, was nominated in, starting a long-standing tradition of nominating animated movies that have no reason to be anywhere near the Oscars just because they’re cartoony (see Boss Baby and Shark Tale for other good examples).

That being said, I can’t say that this movie is bad but I can definitely understand why it didn’t win this award, especially given that it was up against Monsters Inc. and Shrek. Even if this movie didn’t feel incredibly dated because of strange, stilted CGI animation that is outshone by most modern TV shows, it doesn’t break any new ground or have anything particularly clever to say. If I were to compare this movie to one of its characters, I wouldn’t pick its namesake but Jimmy’s sidekick Carl (link from the show, not the movie). It’s inconsequential, almost smart but not quite and incredibly, stupidly lame.

Speaking of things that are stupidly lame, let’s talk about the soundtrack! Unfortunately, I can’t find a great example to show you but the licensed soundtrack that they use is mostly just faded in for brief moments and then quietly swept away by dialogue. This by itself isn’t a problem as a lot of movies during this time period did things like this (and some RomComs still do). The problem lies in the fact that the soundtrack has aged about as well as the Space Jam Website meaning that every single ounce of it reminds you of the era of Boy Bands and “Innocent” Britney Spears. This is a soundtrack that believes Aaron Carter’s career is going to last and that a tween Hip Hop cover of He Blinded Me With Science is a good idea. It is so distracting whenever it plays that if you’re anything like me, you are taken out of the movie for entire scenes because it feels incredibly out of place and unlike anything else you’ve ever heard. Literally, only two of the Soundtrack’s two songs can still stand on their own two feet today and one is a cover of Kids in America which I think is contractually required to be put into every “modern day” “kids movie” ever made.

The other one is Pop by *NSync. If you don’t like them, we can’t be friends anymore.

Unfortunately, the only other things that stood out about the movie were character differences between this movie and the (arguably) much better TV show that came after it. Cindy looks weird with pigtails and that long pink shirt. Libby, Carl, and Sheen are nowhere near the fleshed out characters they’d later become. Most glaringly, most of the characters sound like they’ve just ingested helium off camera. This is admittedly a lot of nitpicking if you can call this complaining at all but as someone who watched the show quite a bit, it was really, REALLY bizarre.

Now that the negatives are out of the way, I’m honestly not quite sure what to say about the rest of the movie. The plot is cliche, the character designs are basic at best and Martin Short isn’t THAT annoying. I guess I could point out that Patrick Stewart is almost unrecognizable as the main villain but really, what’s the point. It’s not like the giant floating eggs have become staples of pop culture.

This movie is just kind of there. I feel like it was only nominated for Best Animated Feature because they wanted to pick a third movie to nominate. I’m sure I’ll have more to say about Shrek and Monsters Inc. and thank god for that. I’d hate to think of a world where this won the first Best Animated Feature award.

Rating: 5/10

Should it have won? Definitely not!