Boonie Bears: Future Reborn review – kiddie Chinese eco-fable is like Mad Max on mushrooms
When George Michael recorded Careless Whisper, there can be no doubt his ultimate ambition for it would have been to soundtrack a garish animated sequence in which two anthropomorphic bears gambol through a prairie of giant fungus experiencing ecstatic visions as hallucinogenic spores rain down on them. Such is the frantic way of this Chinese cartoon franchise, as relentless and exhausting as ever in its 11th feature-film instalment. Five minutes in, before the credits, it has crammed in a post-apocalyptic prologue, oodles of eco-babble, a time-travelling tyke and an avalanche.
This latest one jumps on the fungal-panic bandwagon: Saylor (voiced by Nicola Vincent in the English-language version) has nipped back 100 years to locate the original spores at the root of a pestilence that has eradicated most of life on Earth. It turns out that hapless nature guide Vick (Chris Boike), seen polluting the forest with his tourists, was responsible for spreading them After Saylor fails to kill the mushroom in the cradle, the pair – along with Vick’s forest buddies, the bears Bramble (Joseph S Lambert) and Briar (Patrick Freeman) – are whisked back to the future. They discover a fungus-carpeted nightmare of a planet, overshadowed by a giant skyscraping toadstool.
As the fellowship traverses this wasteland, the film is a mycological Mad Max, souped up with some mech bolt-ons when they arrive at the floating city run by overbearing mayor Trystan (Christopher Price). The animation is impressive as far as blighted panoramas and meteor-like spore storms go. But the main character models are oddly denuded and doll-like – reflecting a general lack of effort with the protagonists from director Lin Yongchang, who helmed the last two instalments. Beyond fart-centric comic relief, Bramble and Briar have nothing to do (the animators at least convincingly flesh out pudgy ursine hindquarters).
This noisy rampage somehow squeezes out room for bursts of screwy humour that featured in previous Boonie Bears outings. The authoritarian villainy and family revelations are as half-baked as the eco-messaging is trite and sanctimonious. A heavier dose of the psychedelic shrooms might have taken this somewhere interesting.
