Animation has come a long way, hasn't it? Film companies like Disney, Pixar, DreamWorks, and Illumination have shown us that animated movies can be just as strong as live action movies with some of their movies now being considered classics. They've charmed and delighted audiences for years and they will continue to do so into the future. "Norm of the North" however, is certainly not going to be one of them. It's not even close to being considered a good movie and I mean by any means. This film is bad. Really, really, really, really bad. It's so bad that it reaches levels you wouldn't imagine. It goes to areas that you probably wouldn't even dare to go to. It reaches sections of the bottom of the barrel, maybe even beyond the bottom of the barrel. I honestly don't know where to start, but I'll try to tell the story as best as I can because it's really truly awful.
The film focuses on a polar bear named Norm (played by Rob Schneider of all people). He lives in the Arctic, twerks to music from an iPod he randomly got somewhere, can talk to humans, and the other Arctic animals make fun of him. Why can he talk to humans? Why do others make fun of him? I don't know. The movie doesn't explain why because I guess the three screenwriters for this movie got lazy. Apparently, some humans decide to build condos in the Arctic also for unknown reasons but my theory is probably because they have IQ numbers under 10, and Norm doesn't like this. So, he goes off to New York City with three lemmings and tries to convince humans not to build condos in his home. Now, get a load of this. The idiotic humans believe that Norm is an actor in a polar bear costume and hire him to be a spokesperson for the company building the condos. I would want to complain about the story even more, but I want to keep my sanity so I'm just going to move on.
Everything about "Norm of the North" is terrible, and I mean everything. The story I just mentioned is so stupid. It's probably one of the worst I've ever heard in my life and that's saying a lot given the movies I've watched. The point of the movie is to shove a painful environmental message down our throats and because the writers thought that the audience would be so stupid and forget the message after the movie, they decided to repeat it throughout the course of the movie and I have no idea how this script was found suitable by the film studio as it had the intelligence of a dead goldfish. The animation is also garbage. It doesn't look suitable for theaters and it shocks me how disgusting it turned out. I found out that this movie was originally supposed to be made just for a DVD release, but the animation doesn't even look like its suitable for DVD either. It reminded me of those awful mock-buster films. If you never heard of them before, its where a studio is so desperate for money they try ripping off actual good animated movies. That's how bad the animation gets. The human models, in particular, were just disturbing. Not only do they cross into areas of the uncanny valley, the models just looked so lifeless and unconvincing. Also, the animators clearly have never been to New York City as the city they showed looked nothing like it. It had no recognizable buildings and also had no recognizable landmarks apart from the Statue of Liberty which only appears onscreen for a whopping five seconds. Another major flaw was that the traffic seemed to be normal and there was no sign of traffic at all. That is a serious flaw and just shows you how lazy the animators were. The characters were also idiotic. The humans once again have no intelligence, no brains, and probably haven't even been inside an elementary school at all. How could they believe that this polar bear in front of them was just a guy in a costume? Did they take a hallucinogen before they went to work? Also, why are they always addicted to their stupid smartphones? Who thought these characters were suitable for theaters?! Well, I digress. Throw in the fact that the lemmings that Norm had around him were just rip-offs of the Minions from "Despicable Me" and basically you get a cast of unoriginal and unfunny characters. The movie was really slow and boring. Despite the movie being only an hour and a half long, it felt like three. I kept looking at the time frequently during my viewing of the film feeling like this film went on forever. I really struggled to find something at least tolerable about the movie and I did realize the performance of Schneider was not that awful. Even though I don't like his comedy, I will give him credit he did try his best to work with this garbage, but in hindsight, that's really not saying a lot.
"Norm of the North" is terrible. It's one of the worst animated movies of all time and I really mean that. I'm just honestly in shock by the horror I had witnessed for ninety minutes and I really wished I could get a time machine to warn myself to not watch the film. I don't know what else to say. It's just bad. If you want to watch a better children's movie with Rob Schneider in it, just watch "Home Alone 2". Yeah, I know it's a Christmas movie but at least he has a minor role and doesn't play a twerking polar bear.
