In its caliber of animation and storytelling, StarDog and TurboCat is vaguely tolerable at best. The only way to deal with this movie, really, is to damn it with the faint praise it earns by, well, being a computer-animated movie. At least it put several dozen people to work for a month or two. Those people could have paid some bills or given their children some allowance or put food on the table for at least a few weeks. All those activities are infinitely more valuable than the time spent watching the end result of their efforts, but you have to be thankful for the small things sometimes. Here is another example of relative thankfulness: At 91 minutes, the movie doesn’t feel any longer than it should. That is always a good thing, and it’s what separates this from being completely worthless.
There isn’t much to this movie. The story follows Buddy (voice of Nick Frost), the loyal canine of owner David (writer/director Ben Smith), an astronaut who sends his pet into space on a top-secret mission. Something goes wrong in the space capsule, sending Buddy forward 50 years into a future where dogs are feared by humans. Frightened that he might have missed his opportunity to reunite with David, Buddy teams up with perennially disaffected feline TurboCat (Luke Evans) to find his capsule and return to his master. But it seems a human named Peck (Cory English) is after a mysterious crystal that can do something-or-other, so that he can have ultimate power and whatnot.
To that end, TurboCat introduces Buddy, who eventually takes on the other eponymous moniker when he inexplicably gains the power of super-strength, to a troupe of scientists, led by cat Cassidy (Gemma Arterton) and otherwise comprised of Todd (Robert G. Slade), goldfish Bullion (Ben Bailey Smith) and timid mouse Tinker (Rachel Louise Miller). That means Smith’s screenplay has a lot of characters, all of them with slight variations on each other’s personalities and each of them essentially indistinguishable from the others. Predictably, Peck’s role in all this is a bit of misdirection meant to throw Buddy and TurboCat off the trail of the real villain, whose identity is plainly obvious from the moment of arrival onscreen.
The characters are likable, in ways as generic as the indistinctive animation that half-heartedly brings them to life. The trajectory of the plot has no surprises, save for a pretty good one just two minutes before the end credits roll. The major conflict is just an excuse for mild action sequences, and the humor is defined by flavorless pop-culture references, animal-related clichés and, yes, bodily functions. StarDog and TurboCat, then, is a garden-variety, adventure-flavored buddy comedy with little to set it apart from its contemporaries made by high-powered animation studios and creators with formidable imaginations.
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