Movie Review: The Queen’s Corgi

The Queen’s Corgi

Directors:  Vincent Kesteloot, Ben Stassen

Starring: Rusty Shackleford, Jo Wyatt, Leo Barakat, Mari Devon, Dino Andrade, Joey Camen, Nicole Sherman, Kirk Thornton

Runtime: 85 minutes

Ah, summer. Time for frolics, memories and really bad CGI animation cash grabs.  This is one of them. Really bad CGI animation cash grabs.  No wonderful memories to be found here, only horror stories kids!

The plot of the film is so basic, so simple, one could swear a robot wrote it. It’s just about a dog that gets taken to the pound when he escapes under a fence from Buckingham Palace, meets a lady dog, falls in love, and gets back to his owner (The Queen, obviously) at the end of the film. I’d have warned about you about spoilers at the start of this review if I didn’t think that anybody with a passing knowledge of films would have guessed this plot for the trailers alone. It’s so damn dull and uninspired, to the point I found myself counting the minutes until the eventual bliss that would come with the end of the film.

The film is extremely poorly animated. It’s not quite Foodfight levels of bad (but only because it looks a bit cleaner), but it’s really bad, one of the worst animated films I’ve seen in a while. There are certain scenes and sequences in which the lip-syncing doesn’t even line up, and some of the animations for the corgis are just horrifically bad.

The cast is perhaps the most forgettable thing about this nightmare of a movie. None of them make an impact, none of them care about the roles they’re playing clearly (although to be fair, would you care about your role as an animated corgi? Thought not.) I’d go through the cast one by one, but for some insane reason, there are two different casts. One for the US and one for the UK. I’ve not known a film to actually do this before, so I’ll just have to sum it up by running through the main cast for the version I watched. Lee Barakat is awful as the main role, Rex (the titular corgi) and everybody else is either as bad or worse. I mean, to be fair I don’t know what I was accepting from a kids film that made a sexual assault joke within the first twenty minutes of its runtime, but I’d like a decent supporting cast and not just the blandest possible voice actors.

So yeah, The Queen’s Corgi is horrific, and completely trash. Honestly, I’d be hard-pressed to think of an animated film that I’ve ever hated more. The best films have a message, a moral. Look at Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse, look at The Lion King, look at Up. The Queen’s Corgi, however, has none of that. No message, and thus no point and no reason for anybody to ever suffer through this. It’s just a really bad time for all involved.

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