Anthomation Assesess Turbo

Howdy guys, Anthomaton here. Today I shall suffer for a movie that is painfully cringeworthy: Turbo.

Turbo is a 2013 animated film from DreamWorks animation, who at the time was in this strange and financially-lacking period where you could one of the best sequels to its breathtaking animated predecessor (take your pick with Kung Fu Panda 2 (2011) or How to Train Your Dragon 2 (2014))…or you could get a film about a snail who is fast. Yikes! The film was met with mixed to positive reviews. Despite earning $282.5 million on a $127 million budget, the studio had to take a total of $15.6 million write-down on behalf of the film. 

Turbo is a speed-obsessed snail with an unusual dream: to become the world’s greatest racer. This odd snail gets a chance to leave his slow-paced life behind when a freak accident gives him the power of superspeed. Newly revved-up, Turbo embarks on an extraordinary quest to enter and win the Indianapolis 500. Accompanied by a dedicated pit crew of trash-talking adrenaline junkies, Turbo becomes the ultimate underdog by refusing to let his limitations get in the way of his dreams.

The story is unbelievably stale. I don’t know why I have been reviewing movies with cookie cutter plots lately, but that trend will not cease any time soon with movies like Turbo. The underdog who wants to prove the world wrong and takes the champion down is unbelievably cliched and this movie makes no qualms about it. Literally, you could watch just the first 5 minutes and know where the entire story is going there. The one “deviation” this movie does take is that his pit crew is led by a taco truck driver that wants to make his life better and believes that the snail is his shooting star. I use air quotes for deviation because this is not breaking the mold anyway and just establishes how quick the screenwriters wanted to get this screenplay over with. Oh and how cannot forget the most cringeworthy song ever created: That Snail is Most. That song is like junk food for the mind. It is almost getting stuck in your head, but you know it is bad for you. Kind of like the soundtrack to the Frozen films. 

The animation is alright, but definitely not to the best of the ability of the studio behind. Again, How to Train Your Dragon 2 was released the next year! So when you compare that to Turbo, the dropoff in visual quality is blatantly obvious. There are a lot of places I could nitpick, but the place I want to focus on is the character designs. Looking at the HTTYD films, the characters have a sense of realism and honesty to them. Sure they can be big movements and character expressions, but they can also convey developed and even grounded emotions almost seamlessly. Here, everyone looks cartoonish and always has puppy dog eyes and mouths bigger than whales. This also affirms the ultimate cliche that every animation fan despises: Animation is just for kids! I hate it just as much as you, though that narrative will not disappear if we keep letting kiddy crap like this be the norm in the mainstream market.

The characters are just as unoriginal as the story. Fitting. There is Theo/Turbo (voiced by Ryan Reynolds), a garden snail who dreams of becoming a racer and the next Indianapolis 500 champion and obtains superspeed during a car race. There’s Chet (voiced by Paul Giamatti), Turbo’s older brother who serves as Turbo’s doubter throughout the entire film. This is already bland enough, but when it is the protagonist’s brother serving this role, it comes off as needlessly cruel. Kind of like how Chicken Little’s Dad is an absolute jerk to the titular character. There’s Tito Lopez (Michael Pena), a “Dos Bros” taco truck driver who finds and befriends Turbo. There’s Angelo Lopez, who is the Chet to Tito’s Turbo. Again, brothers are absolute jerks in this film. And then there is Guy Gagné (voiced by Bill Hader), a French-Canadian Indy 500 champion who is the greedy champion that will stop at nothing to make sure the underdog does not prevail. Also, Samuel L. Jackson plays a snail. I only bring this up because he must have been embarrassed to say half of his lines just for how cringey they were…and use a couple that I cannot repeat here.

Turbo is a piece of garbage that DreamWorks should hope to forget about. In fact, I am going to use one word to describe the entire film: unimaginative. The story is unimaginative. The animation is unimaginative. The characters are, you guessed it, UNIMAGINATIVE. Folks, I can only recommend this one to little kids as a film you happen to scroll through on Netflix. It does not exceed those expectations.

Score:

3/10