"Open Season" Was Too Dumb for My Child

I think I'm having a breakdown. The final touch, the coup de grâce, as it were, was a kids' movie.

I wasn't going to take my son Louis to see Open Season, but he begged and pleaded, using the time-old saw, "But all the other kids have seen it." So, off we trotted and into the abyss I fell. Open Seasonis just about everything that's wrong with modern culture. That's a lot, you might think. Okay, I'll winnow it down; Open Season is the very worst that modern culture has to offer. That's still a lot you say. Okay, two words then: Ashton Kutcher.

I won't bore you with the plot details of the film. If you've seen any ads, you've probably gleaned pretty much the entire premise: it's the old story of animals versus people. A bear named Boog (voiced by Martin Lawrence) is raised by a park ranger (Debra Messing). Boog is an animal who has come to love his own captivity (like an prisoner institutionalized love to his cage). The comforts of civilized life -- indoor plumbing, three square meals a day -- make life is easy, and old Boog is coddled with the age-old cozy handcuffs of security. Until, that is, a deer named Elliot (Ashton-please butcher-Kutcher) enters his world, and turns it on its head. Elliot (or idiot as he is referred to throughout the film) teaches the bear to embrace the wild animal within and return to his true nature. End of story.

All the set pieces are there: the Borscht-belt shtick that was old-hat when I was little, a few sentimental lessons learned, a villain soundly beaten, catch phrases masquerading as writing (example: "my bad"), scenes taken from other films (a little Braveheart), one big epic battle between the forces of good and bad, and everyone goes back to their respective places. Just another assembly line movie that kids drag their parents to after having been seduced by one too many toy tie-ins at Burger King. It's a product, made and marketed to children, imminently forgettable, with nary one genuine moment or original idea. So, what's the problem? Pay your money, take your chances and quit your bellyaching. This sounds simple enough to do, but there are a few issues that won't go so easily away.

Wandering minds want to know

While sitting through kid's movies, one's mind has time to wander, to question the nature of the universe, to ask imponderables -- like why is it inappropriate to fill adult films with racial stereotypes, but perfectly acceptable to do so in movies made for kids? Black people are lazy, Chinese people are greedy, the Scots like to drink, and the French are cowards. As long these ideas are clothed in cartoon-colours, they are somehow supposed to be innocuous, funny even. Propaganda that adults would balk at imbibing goes down in one swallow with children, often because they don't know any better. This is not a new idea but sometimes the sheer proliferation and the hard heavy sell of popular culture aimed at kids needs a firm critique on the behind.

Another curious aspect of the film is the sinking feeling that you've seen this all before. That's because, in fact you have seen it all before. Within the past few months, there have been a number of animated films with a very similar story line (i.e., animals in conflict with civilization). Over the Hedge told a similar tale about animals wanting what the humans have -- namely junk food and suburban track houses. Even the characters are pretty much interchangeable, such as a German house pet, who just wants to be free, trash-talking skunk chicas, and a hunter who shoots wee creatures for the sheer love of it. In Open Season, the villain is a mullet-headed red neck, while in Over the Hedge it was an exterminator with an out-sized lust for the kill. Another recent film, Barnyard, featured a story in which animals coveted the human world. Although Barnyard had a few even more troubling things about it, not the least of which was the deeply unsettling image of macho bulls sporting huge udders (there was something almost Cronenberg-esque about those big pink appendages). This may have engendered some deep confusion on the part of young minds. But again, the subtext of the film was the idea animals actually want to behave like people. What does this mean exactly?