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With an estimated $60 million budget, Rock Dog might be the most expensive animated movie ever to be financed by a Chinese company, but it's not clear looking at it where much of the money went. Aside from an opening sequence that's hand-drawn and vastly superior to what follows, it's an ugly looking movie that constantly reuses character models so that, for instance, multiple sheep characters look exactly the same, and multiple wolf characters merely appear to have had their proportions adjusted to differentiate them. Maybe it cost that much because it was made in Texas, and features high-profile voice talents like Luke Wilson, Eddie Izzard and Matt Dillon. Or licensing Foo Fighters songs costs just that much. Regardless, it was not money well spent: in China, the movie fell victim to feuding movie theater chains, and it made only around $7.8 million.
Like The Great Wall, this was a movie conceived to appeal to China and America in equal measure and "introduce cross-cultural values and philosophies"; thus far it has failed to please either. Based on a comic book by Chinese rock star Zheng Jun that was originally entitled Tibetan Rock Dog, it dropped the T-word for obvious Chinese business reasons, even though it refers to the canine breed of Tibetan Mastiff rather than the Dalai Lama's disputed territory. But it was cast English-first, and written with a mostly American sensibility, though not too American - Zheng Jun insists he had to fire some of "Hollywood's best screenwriters" for not being open enough to Chinese ideas. The weirdest remaining American reference is a pun based on Pasadena, which I don't imagine being a super-familiar area to Chinese viewers.
And for all that time and money and attempt to broaden the audience, we deserve better than a cut-rate Kung Fu Panda/Zootopia/Yellow Submarine mash-up that's substantially inferior to everything it apes. But so it goes.
J.K. Simmons, who was actually in the last Kung Fu Panda film, plays Khampa, the Mastiff who watches over a mountain village in Tibe...Er, I mean Snow Mountain! Yeahhh, that's it. You think it might resemble a region China doesn't want recognized as a separate country but it isn't, all right? The inhabitants of the village who aren't mastiffs are sheep, frequently preyed on by wolves, which leads Khampa to militarize the entire population, banning music because he thinks that's only a distraction (obviously, he has never sung "I don't know but I've been told" while marching). Because the wolves aren't very smart (and for other possible reasons revealed later), Khampa dresses the sheep up in giant wooden wolf costumes and has them fake-practice every day, which serves as a deterrent. Meanwhile, his son Bodi (Luke Wilson) is a disappointment because he can't master the ability to throw video-game style fireballs from his palm like dad.
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When a radio falls from a plane flying overhead, Bodi tunes in, turns on...and based on the song lyrics, turns his two-string shamisen into a six-string guitar (Kubo needs to show up and kick his tail for that one). Khampa grudgingly lets him go to the city to pursue his dream, but with the admonition that if he comes back a failure, he must never play again.
Here's where it gets culturally weird: the city not so far away from not-Tibet is almost entirely American, save for its premiere rock star Angus Scattergood (Izzard), an English cat with a Union Jack guitar. Actually, the city is basically Zootopia, only without sight gags, humor, or anything interesting at all actually happening. Here, the wolves who menace Bodi's village are limo-riding, gun-toting, suit-wearing mobsters...so why are they bothering a primitive village for sheep? Alternately, why can't Khampa spend equal time in the city rounding up better weapons? Or would that make the movie too American?
But this is Rock Dog, not Gangster Dog, so Bodi's task is to find the power of music to beat back the meanies from his hometown, a tactic I think I saw in a much better cartoon once. To do that he has to persuade the arrogant Angus to help him, and since Angus is the epitome of a decadent English rock caricature, that won't be easy, until it suddenly is.
Did I mention there's also a running Big Lebowski gag, with Sam Elliott narrating the story as a wise old sage named...Fleetwood Yak? Yeah, that happened. Really ties the movie together, inasmuch as that's possible.
Wilson's okay in the lead, but I really wish he did all his own singing. I'm not sure it would be good, exactly, but it would be funnier than any of the jokes here. Lewis Black, as the lead wolf named Linnux for no apparent computing in-joke reason, is an okay bad guy, not quite as unleashed as in Inside Out, but close. Izzard steals the show, at least to a point, probably because as a monologuist he's used to delivering long stretches of dialogue at nothing.
Not that any of this makes Rock Dog a particularly good movie; it's inert, visually boring and never especially funny or exciting. The occasional amenable actor moments are just something to allay your fears if the kids somehow drag you to it. I paid $14.99 for a ticket at a Burbank AMC; you shouldn't even pay that much for the DVD, which you can probably expect in bargain bins very soon.
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