Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)Let me admit that I'm a childless adult. A child or the parent of one may be more enthusiastic than me.
In the same way that "Shrek" (at least the first installment) had the message of not judging a book by its cover, this work has several stories in which characters are kind to strangers in need. The work could have been broken up into three minisodes: Lars visits the city, Lars takes a tiger home, Lars and father visit Color Island.
I find that children's cartoons on DVD usually lack the foreign language and subtitle options that DVDs for older audiences have. This DVD had many language and subtitle options. (The original cartoon is German.) I watched in Spanish with English subtitles. Sometimes adult Spanish speakers talk far too quickly for me to understand (not like they are wrong for not slowing down); but this kiddy dialogue was slow and simple enough for a dude that just took one year of Spanish to understand it. For teens and tweens older than this DVD's target audience, listening to the foreign languages or reading the subtitles may make the work more valuable.
This work really doesn't have villains. It's just 90 minutes of friends helping friends. Issues are resolved quickly: lost characters are found within minutes, tensions are resolved in a snap.
When seeieng the tiger on the cover, I assumed that Lars would travel to India. However, this was a snow tiger in Russia. In the first Lars movie, having a WHITE bear and a BLACK seal become friends screamed that this borrowed from "The Fox and the Hound" and was similarly a metaphor for interracial friendships. That same message is here, but more subtly.
In the first Lars film, Lars was deep underwater, yet his mouth was opening and closing as if he were taking in air. This cartoon at least recognized animals' limitation. The seal had a hard time moving across a stone fence. The tigers feared water. The arctic was too cold for a butterfly.
Some adults disliked that "The Land Before Time" showed adult and child dinosaurs interacting with each other when modern reptiles lay their eggs and move on. Here, the polar bear and tiger cubs were mostly cared for by their fathers. In the real wilderness, I'm almost sure they would never have even seen their fathers. Perhaps the downplaying of mothers meant this work was targeted to boys.
If you liked Winnie the Pooh with that Heffalump or loved the moral messages at the end of He-Man or She-Ra, then you should appreciate this DVD.
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