Home (2015) (English Language)

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Review

94min

Genre: Animation, Action, Adventure, Comedy, Family

Cast: Jim Parsons, Rihanna, Steve Martin…and more

Writers: Matt Ember, Tom J. Astle , Adam Rex

When a cuddly nomadic race of Aliens named the ‘Boov’ decide to settle the Earth and “re-locate” all humans to Australia, a young precocious girl named ‘Tip’ is forced to search the globe for her mother with the unlikely help of one of the aliens named ‘Oh’, a blundering misfit among his own race who inadvertently puts his entire species in danger from the threat that sent them to Earth in the first place, together ‘Tip’ and ‘Oh’ will save each other and learn the true meaning of friendship and “home”.

Heavyweight animation studio DreamWorks has gone all-out to ensure the success of ‘Home’ securing the vocal talents of ‘The Big Bang Theory’s’ Jim Parsons and pop superstar Rihanna for the roles of ‘Oh’ and ‘Tip’ respectively as well as other stars like Steve Martin and Jennifer Lopez.

As you might expect from a big-budget family animation ‘Home’ is beautifully rendered and full of impressive action sequences as well as your classic “clash-of-cultures” comedy, typically from a DreamWorks production this is also at heart a story about belonging and friendship featuring the common theme of the “misfit” becoming the hero.

What you may not expect ‘Home’ to be is an unintentional but nevertheless disturbingly fuzzy Fable about colonialism and the displacement of indigenous peoples, nevertheless the theme is there for all to see and is at odds with the over-sentimental nature of the film, something particularly hard for an animation to achieve but when the story is this predictable it’s difficult to ignore.

Despite the moderately funny moments that come from the inevitable “fish-out-of-water” comedy storyline, there is just not enough for an adult audience to hang on to here and the sentimentality and unoriginal interpretation of a familiar storyline make ‘Home’ much more a film for the Kids than for the whole family, particularly disappointing given the success of DreamWorks’ own ‘How to Train Your Dragon 2’ and Disney’s brilliant Oscar-winning animation ‘Big Hero 6’ earlier in the year.

Not the best DreamWorks release in recent memory, given the soundtrack it’s more of an extended PG Rihanna music video than a memorable animated masterpiece, ‘Home’ is charming enough but really one for the kids rather than everyone else.

‘Home‘‘is previewing this weekend and is released next Friday the 20th in the UK.

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