08-06-2019, 01:36 AM
(08-06-2019, 01:25 AM)Dust Bowl Wrote: Maya the Bee: The Honey Games.
I'll wager that anyone who has kids (or has babysit particularly small children) have found themselves in the middle of a situation in which the little ones are completely exhausted, yet refuse to go to bed.
It is certainly quite the experience, with the kids --more often than not-- screaming and misbehaving, because they are that tired, yet refuse to put themselves to sleep. There are very few things to be done when that time arrives, other than having patience and maybe hoping that something would catch their attention enough for their batteries to be depleted. That's where I found myself last week.
Making use of the time-proven tradition of searching through every available channel in hopes that something nice would come up, I caught glance of Discovery Kid's announcement of a Maya the Bee movie coming up next.
Maya was a character from my childhood, so I was quite excited to share her with my nephews, but I still looked her up to see if the design and other things would appeal to the kids... thankfully, they seemed excited about the idea of watching her movie. And I was too, particularly after seeing this rather badass poster of The Honey Games.
Now, I know that all of this must sound quite strange to all of you people of the future, who are probably scratching your heads and have already half-typed a post asking me why I didn't go to YouTube instead and tried to grab something from its seemingly-endless poll of kid-friendly content. Well, mainly for two reasons:
1) I have mobile internet, so YouTube is tremendously off-limits for me, for I don't wanna be poor
2) It's come to my attention that there's some true human trash on the site, who edit episodes of cartoons and kiddie films to add screamers and other things to otherwise perfectly fine toons in order to terrorize the little ones. I'm heavily disgusted by all of that, but I suppose it is easy enough to avoid.
But regardless, as soon as the film started, I got some serious "this is gonna be good" vibes.
Maybe it is because I'm nostalgic for the character, or maybe this just really works.
I found that the movie had an excellent sense of direction, that the animation was consistently great in both the foreground and background (and often found myself looking around, to see what the background characters were up to) and that they were surprisingly light on the bee-puns (although, I do love that the main antagonist is called Beegood).
It is strange, really, because I hadn't really even heard about Studio100 before, yet it is obvious that they work is worth noticing. Literally the first thing you see upon getting past the static credits is a delightfully-made animation of a star soaring through the sky, flying past cloud formations depicting characters the studio has animated. That takes time, effort and love... and I SO wish it was the standard for the industry.
But technical achievements aside, I must say, without revealing anything, that the plot is likely to rank among the weakest you have seen, but it is totally carried by the characters, songs and some of the dialogue.
Besides happy-go-lucky Maya, you have the extremely worrisome Willy (who honestly looks perpetually stoned, among all pieces of media), the bone-headed ant soldiers Arnie and Barnie, who made the kids and I laugh our lungs off due to them starting a fight in the middle of a dance segment, for no reason at all. And you also have Spinder, the vegetarian spider. Some of her dialogue is excellent and I feel like quoting her everytime I can, particularly these two lines:
"If it's got a face, I won't eat it".
And:
"It is raining in my soul right now".
The rest of characters are also fun to watch but I feel like they have way too little dialogue to leave any kind of impression. If it weren't for the aforementioned animation, you wouldn't really know they were there.
But anyway... the movie did do what I asked it for: it kept the kids occupied while sleep sneaked up on them, and they fell about a quarter of the way in. I kept watching all the way to the end credits, where I was greeted by three awesome songs.
I came to this film desperately looking for something to keep the kids occupied with and left feeling really satisfied indeed.
I'd recommend anyone who has kids OR is into animation to give "The Honey Games" a try. You might love it!
According to all known laws
of aviation,
there is no way a bee
should be able to fly......
But, so I stopped reading this midway though and unknowingly scrolled up to your Stalingrad -- Dogs review...and got really confused "What... Maya the bee has WW2 metaphors....wha...."
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The EU killed the Internet star
The EU killed the Internet star
In my mind and in my phone, we can't rewind we've gone too far
Article 13 came and broke your heart
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General Sherman
“It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.”
Aristotle (maybe)
The EU killed the Internet star
The EU killed the Internet star
In my mind and in my phone, we can't rewind we've gone too far
Article 13 came and broke your heart
Put down the blame on copyright