Academic

I am a little behind.  My kids and I rushed out to see Gnomeo & Juliet opening weekend, for reasons that elude me.  I remember driving to the theater, thinking, "I'm going to see a movie about garden gnome statues."  And we did.

As you might have guessed, the movie is loosely based on Shakespeare's Romeo & Juliet.  However, being a children's movie, this version has a happy ending and fewer dead young men.  Juliet is a red-hatted gnome, who lives with her father and the other red-hatted gnomes in a manicured English garden adjacent to another manicured English garden filled with blue-hatted gnomes.  Not only do the gnomes despise one another, but the respective English owners of these garden homes also hate one another.  Ah, a long-standing feud, with British accents.  The gnomes' feud plays out in drag races of gnomes on lawn mowers in the alley and in their daily competition to have more beautiful gardens.  (How the homeowners do not catch on to their statues' gardening skills is not addressed.)

Juliet lives a lonely life atop a pond fountain, guarded by her overly protective (widowed) father.  Gnomeo lives the life of a gnome warrior, spurred on by his loving (widowed) mother.  Once they meet across the alley in an abandoned garden, they fall in love and so begin their march toward a Shakespearean tragic ending.  Juliet's nurse/confidante is Nanette, a frog statue, and the role of the Friar is played by a pink flamingo.  Nope, not making this up.  Interestingly, Tybalt is named Tybalt, Paris is named Paris, but Mercutio is named Benny.  (And, he doesn't die.  He's just maimed a little.)  Perhaps this is a nod toward the ever-present musical score, which is made up of Elton John hits.  Or, perhaps it's just a recognition that Mercutio is a bad name.

The movie is cute and relatively painless.  That's not high praise, though.  The animation is just so-so, and this is because of the material -- plaster statues.  Statues don't make great animation.  They aren't very expressive or colorful.  Also, the writers make the really bad mistake of introducing the human life cycle into the realm of inanimate objects.  How can one statue be another's father?  A lot is said about statues dying, which leaves open the question of how a statue is born.  I mentioned my issues with this years ago when I saw the (now forgotten) animated movie Robots.  Notice Toy Story does not talk about any sort of family ties between toys or use the words "birth" or "death."  That's because those concepts don't work with normally inanimate decorations.

At the end of the movie, the houses combine (though not the human parts of the houses) and there is a big Elton John dance party, a la Shrek.  The bottom line is we won't buy the DVD, but it was an easy way to spend the afternoon.