Hatched, a movie that was better off in the shell

Families want, and sometimes need entertainment. It’s obviously best if said entertainment is OK for everyone in the family. It’s in that spirit that Hatched is available on DVD. Hatched is a film that will most likely rocket to the bottom of your DVD stack. Unless you’re 6 years old and this is the second movie you’ve see it’s most likely the worst animated film that you’ve seen.

The tag line on the back of the case says “small hero big adventure” and that’s fair enough. Many animated films have taken the premise of a small barnyard animal and produced something passable. The film starts off clever enough introducing us to the characters, Cluck Norris, Charlie Horse, Angelina Poultrie and others that poke fun at famous actors.

Shortly after that Hatched starts the story and anyone over six will abruptly fall asleep or get a head ache. Stop me if you’ve heard this before, the chickens are learning how to fly. Chicken Run did this premise and made a cute, albeit, flawed film. Hatched takes any heart that prior farm films had and crams them all into a mish mash mess of a film that only the director’s mother could love.

The color in the film is too bright. I’m all for a bright, happy film, but the colors in Hatched are fluorescent neon, more reminiscent of a Florida strip mall than a farm.

The ‘farm’ has more resemblance to a Salvadore Dali painting than a traditional farm. There are giant mushrooms, massive structures and a strange ocean looking creature that flies who enters as a side character in the film. I like weird, but the weird has to have some form of story and this one is tired.

Hatched was originally released overseas and that is great, but don’t sell the film as an English film. I mention this because the dubbing is horrible, wait, the dubbing is bad because the film was in another language initially. When I figured out that the lip movements to language spoken was off by a second or two and that the shape of the pronunciation was not even close, it was over.

That; combined with the plot that we’ve all seen, dialogue that was made for (bad) TV, characters that merged together into one quickly forgettable creature made me look for the mental exit to my living room quickly. The kids were hanging tough for the next thirty minutes, with me acting as a cushion for a lazy 4 year old.