Wonder Park is a surprisingly effective way to introduce your child to the concept of how unhappy they might become later on in life, reports Dan Slevin.
Photo: Paramount
Animated kids movies can be a bit of a lottery. High-value brands like Pixar are usually reliable (except when they are not). Other players like the producers of the Minions pictures, Illumination, are generating some recognition on the backs of their popular characters but studios like Blue Sky have faded out of view along with their biggest franchise, Ice Age.
Before I trotted along to an early morning session of the Paramount/Nickelodeon release Wonder Park I had submitted myself to the online trailer with a sense of foreboding. Derivative character design, bubblegum colours, lots of rollercoastery action. It looked like this was going to be pandering to the very short attention spans of the younger audience with little time for reflection or emotion.
How wrong can one be?
Wonder Park is, of course, still all of those things – a hyper-sugary confection of theme park fantasy but it also manages to be a sensitive portrayal of childhood depression and fear of loss and quite moving with it.
Photo: Paramount
11-year-old newcomer Brianna Denski is the voice of bright young June Bailey, a child with a vivid imagination that has been encouraged and nurtured by her parents, especially Mom (Jennifer Garner). She builds an imaginary theme park featuring a cast of characters inspired by the toys in her bedroom. When Mom gets sick and has to go away, June spends more time worrying about her rather helpless Dad (Matthew Broderick) and loses interest in Wonder Park.
Packed off to Math Camp in the hope she might get her engineering mojo back, June skips off and on the long walk home she discovers, deep in the woods, the real Wonder Park, fallen in to ruin and in desperate need of some love and care. Her bedroom toy friends, come to life, are worried and only June can provide a solution – if only she could realise it.
Even though it looks like the kind of film that’s going to be spending every noisy moment trying to sell you something, Wonder Park turns out not to be that at all and parents should be prepared to have some deep and meaningful conversations with their little ones on the car ride home.
Incidentally, we should be very grateful that in New Zealand we get the complete US voice cast rather than the Australian or UK stunt casting which features breakfast DJs and YouTube stars over actual actors.
Wonder Park is rated PG for scary scenes and is still playing in limited sessions in cinemas across the country.
