Review for Robinson Crusoe

Robinson Crusoe is a very loose retelling of the classic Daniel Defoe story about a man stranded on a desert island and his adventures while there trying to survive. This CGI Animated tale, instead of following the plot of the book, took the bare bones of the story and turned it into an adventure of a man being helped by animals and attacked by revenge-hungry cats. Yes. Cats.

Now, I can't deny this film looks amazing. This is not the terrible animation I expected, and having seen their previous work on House of Magic I knew that these were people who knew what they were doing technically. However, as with that film, there never feels like they are able to tell a captivating story. This film feels like it is relying too much on the 3D effects it must have had in its theatrical run, but in this 2D version it feels a bit lost.

Throughout the film the animal characters are fun and well created, but they do feel like your typical cliches such as the sassy fat pig, the old aged and confused goat and the evil cat. The whole sequence towards the end with the cat is a combination of dizzying and terrifying action which after about five minutes made my head hurt.

By the end of the film and it is a very abrupt and confusing ending, I was not really sure what had happened in the film and coming back to write this I had to find out exactly what this film was supposed to be. Even then, I'm not sure I watched the film they described. Though I will say in the film's defence, I watched with my children and they loved the film and so it is not surprising that the film was a box office success and maybe as a way to get them to read the original story it can only be a good thing.

The DVD features two extras Characters and Evolution. Characters is a short (and by short I mean less than three minute) look at how a character is created using the parrot character Mac as an example. The information was obvious, they studied a parrot to design him and this really was not entertaining at all. Evolution was a minute look at how the film went from storyboard and animatic to rough animation, retouching and final film. This would have been better as a splitsccreen or angle option to see what the scene would be like in all of its stages. Instead again it was boring and not as interesting as they would like it to be.

Robinson Crusoe is not a bad film it's just not a very good or memorable one. It is a shame that a film that looks so amazing and comes from such an infamous source is a little lacklustre. If you have any children you may find that they will enjoy this, but for many tmhis is possibly one you may want to leave stranded on a desert island.