Directed By Gang Zhang

Starring – Eric Bauza, Benjamin Diskin, Matthew Yang Kim

The Plot – When legendary rivals Tom (Bauza) and Jerry (Diskin) are swept into a chase through one of New York’s finest museums, they unleash a mystical compass that hurls them across time and space. Dropped into a dangerous ancient city, they must outsmart a cunning crime lord, a power-hungry ruler, and an army of warriors as they finally team up to find their way home.

Rated PG for action/violence

New Tom and Jerry: Forbidden Compass Movie | Official Trailer Drop

POSITIVES

As strangely surreal as it is that Warner Bros chose this for a big screen engagement release over Coyote Vs Acme, there are some appealing aspects to the movie’s Chinese produced production that at least makes it somewhat redeemable for enthusiastic masochists like myself, particularly the slapstick shenanigans of its titular dynamic duo, which are just as hilariously delightful as they were when I watched the TV show as a child. Considering they are only at the forefront of this movie’s focus for the opening act, it makes those first twenty minutes or so among the most prosperous for the movie’s long-term integrity, specifically when Jerry’s annoyances grate on the delicate patience of Tom, in turn crafting some urgently enticing chase sequences that surmise no shortage of creatively unexpected set pieces to allow Jerry to escape his feline adversary. Beyond this, while the animation is admittedly a mixed bag in incremental measurements, when it does work it transpires these colorfully radiant and emotionally expressive designs that work cohesively within the fantastically imaginative confines of the Chinese folklore fairytales that surround its plot, especially when the presentation decides to spice up the textural tangibility of its audience’s immersive understanding to the crafted tales. Between triptych optioning of three respective perspectives during any monumental conflict, or the subtle transitioning into two-dimensional hand-drawn animation during flashback backstory sequences, the film proves itself to have plenty of artistic ambition in capturing the attention of its youthful audience, and while these aspects are unfortunately few and far between the 85-minute bigger picture, they do at least supplant some cunningly compelling craftsmanship incrementally that make the movie feel bigger and bolder than anything ever encompassed in its TV show, serving as a conflicting-but-captivating exploit of Chinese animation in its grandest scope.

NEGATIVES

While Tom and Jerry have always had a grave difficulty adapting to feature length cinema, from the depravingly dull 1992 animated film to the 2021 clumsily constructed live action movie, there’s an amateur bizarreness to this particular rendering that easily makes it the weakest of everything previously attempted, beginning with scatterbrained storytelling that has its framed priorities in the wrong place at nearly all times. After a promising opening act of Tom and Jerry clashing destructively in a closed museum, the second act quickly shifts to 16th century China, full of long-winded exposition dumps in the dialogue and uncompelling additional characters who aren’t illustrated or performed with any semblance of compelling symmetry, and while the educational opportunity to imbed the audience in the culture of its surroundings is certainly nothing new with animated cinema, it comes at the uncompromising cost of subjecting Tom and Jerry to the supporting side of the movie’s narrative exploration, making so many of their dwindled spare and sporadic moments feel like tacked-on additions to a story about Chinese folklore rather than their own movie. Structurally, the movie is as anxiously impatient as it is inescapably repetitive, where the egregiously overzealous consistency of the pacing oversteps major foundational building between these characters, in ways that ultimately keep us from investing in a single one of them, and when this is matched with a script with two counterproductive climaxes between its momentum-sucking outline, it leaves the footing of the narrative feeling indecipherable for anyone in the audience even attempting to comprehend how much time is left in the barebones runtime, with my own shocking reality coming in the form of an entire fifty minutes remaining after this collection of characters resolve the conflict for the first time. This is matched aggressively by Gang Zhang’s boisterously obnoxious direction grating on the nerves and patience of my withering connection to the film, where everything from the anxiousness of the frame rate to the audibly annihilating sound design make it difficult to doze off during a movie that feels like the artistic embodiment of a baby continuously screaming in your face. In a lot of ways, the animation constantly feels like it’s being utilized in twice the preferred frame rate, giving it a rushed registry among even its slower and more sedated story beats, and while the sugar rushes of the sound deviate between generically bland pop music needle drops (One such stopping the movie dead in its tracks to enact a rap music video) and enthralling echoing between the on-screen action and devastation to give me Vietnam flashbacks, the opportunity of the immersion was mostly spent with my hands clutching at the tunnels of my sensitive hearing, leaving this the least appealing cinematic experience that I’ve had all year, on interpretation alone. Beyond a stumbling script, deconstructive direction, and questionable framed focus, the inferior side of the aforementioned animated inconsistencies also rears its ugly head to the overall presentation, where some ghastly glaring three-dimensional designs offer a frighteningly horrendous influence to characters who I grew up idolizing. What’s especially suspect here is both the textural dimensionality of the characters, where they’re almost tangibly live action to unmistakably animated backgrounds, as well as the Chinese produced animation not even closely lining in lip-synching to the English post-produced dialogue, and while already overlooking the unfathomable reality that every single one of these Chinese-bred characters speak clear and concise English is a stretch, to say the least, they pale in comparison to how lifelessly hollow the characters come across while constantly interacting physically with their environments, providing an unprofessionally lazy underlining to scenes featuring more than a few noteworthy instances where my attention was intruded upon relentlessly with animated updating that plays transparently artificial to these particular characters. In shifting attention back to the characters once more, the vocal work from this ensemble of relative English unknowns is also greatly detrimental to the magnitude of the dialogue that they’re asked to convey, without anything closely resembling a personality or conductive charisma between their monotonous deliveries. While I absolutely hate to zero in on someone attempting to get their name out to the public eye with their first big break in the industry, it’s examples like these that prove why so many animated studios seek out big name actors to sell these products, as they’re at least capable of providing magnetism to at least trick audiences into thinking they’re having a good time, however because the deliveries here lack emotional conviction to truly sell what they’re delivering, it appraises a grave difficulty investing towards characters who are already presented so uninteresting in the confines of this screenplay, a fact made all the more affirming with so many of their vocal tones failing to line up synthetically with the boldly imposing statures of the character designs. Eric Bauza and Benjamin Diskin do a decent job of emulating the quirky noises of the movie’s titular characters without the assistance of dialogue to elevate their appeal, but everyone else is video game transition scenes of telegraphed reading, and considering the script shifts abruptly to focus faithfully upon these Chinese folklore characters throughout the movie’s second half, the dependability of the actors becomes skewered with enacting material that fails to inspire their collective talents, leaving me wishing that the producers opted for an 85-minute extension of the popular television show rather than an adventurous outlet to dupe people into thinking that this was Tom and Jerry’s story. Finally, even the intentional messaging of the movie is skewered heavy-handedly in a state-sponsored allegory of Chinese propaganda, ingraining such an icky and conniving feeling of desperation to the world’s most impressionable minds. I’m certainly not someone who denounces the objective to learn about mythic characters and folklore, but when a production opts to attach two legendary characters who have absolutely nothing to do with that background, it starts to skewer any semblance of nobility that it had to justify its causes, and while Forbidden Compass is already awful enough without tapping into the geographic relevance of its cinematic opportunity, I’m still left with this inescapable feeling in the pit of my stomach that the movie feels like a motivational measure to counteract the smear campaigns against its totalitarian government, making the movie so much worse than just another poorly made feature length effort.

OVERALL
Tom and Jerry: Forbidden Compass is a chaotically contrived sensorially overloaded experience that not only fools the audience by pushing its dastardly dynamic duo to the supporting sidelines of its structurally stilted storytelling, but also pushes a sleazily slimy form of ingrained propaganda to the interpretability of child audiences, cementing it as morally manipulative and egregiously annoying. While the animated techniques are inconsistent, at best, and what little we get of Tom and Jerry’s catastrophic disputes still charm a childlike cadence from within, there’s no denying that Warner Bros glaring disconnect from society grows stranger with each decision, surmising the one legitimate usage of the overused phrase “Pillaging my childhood”.

My Grade: 2.5 or F