Wonder Park

photo courtesy of collider.com

SPOILER-FREE REVIEW

     Paramount Animation and Nickelodeon present Wonder Park, a comedy adventure about an inventive girl named June (Brianna Denski). June spends her time crafting ideas for her imaginary fantasy world, Wonderland, and its animal inhabitants. But when an unexpected setback takes the creative spark from June’s mind, it’ll take a journey to the real Wonderland—complete with animals companions both friendly and unfriendly—to set things right.

     Chances are Wonder Park wasn’t really on your radar this weekend, and it turns that’s just fine, because Wonder Park is a sweet but totally forgettable animation adventure. The movie struggles to come up with any compelling selling point, and in comparison with the upcoming projects from Disney, Pixar, Illumination, etc, it doesn’t display much imagination or inspiration at all.

photo courtesy of nytimes.com

     Wonder Park is boring, plain and simple. Adults will likely be checking their watches, but I think even the under-10 crowd will struggle to stay invested here. In my theater, kids only laughed at a few of the jokes, and the story, while undoubtedly thoughtful when it comes to June’s emotional arc, never produces anything particularly memorable for them to latch onto. The movie is so unmemorable, in fact, that this reviewer found himself already forgetting it while it was still playing.

     There are some other nitpicks we could delve into (a messy plot, for instance, or the fact that the movie’s called “Wonder Park” when no one ever calls the park “Wonder Park” once in the entire film) but you probably get the point. Wonder Park falls squarely into the lowest tier of animated kids’ features, neither as poignant as Pixar nor as unapologetically silly as Despicable Me. It might be worth your child’s time on streaming in the next few months, but you certainly don’t need to worry about seeing it on the big screen.

Wonder Park is rated PG for some mild thematic elements and action.

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