Absolutely amazing

One of the best movies of the year! Incredible from the beginning to the end.

The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

It's a good bad... and worth a popcorn matinée. While it's easy to lament what could have been...

This is disgrace in almost every way. I have nothing against movies that are meant to be in more than one part, not even those meant to be single movies but then inspired sequels, but when they knock something together just to try and get few dollars more of the old glory... yuck.New cast is not bad itself, some of them are maybe even better than original cast, but they miss the charm that we fell to in first movie. It simply isn't it. Music is copied from first movie. Story is unoriginal and dumb. Humor is rerun or exaggerated or simply pointless. CGI is story for itself. In original movie you could not tell that elephant is not the real one, while here all animals look like they skipped from cartoon. Not only unconvincing, but also very irritating. Screenplay was obviously forced without ideas or inspiration and then put into movie that I barely forced my self to watch till the end. In one word - sad.

Allow me to just get to the bottom line here: I've got 3 kids, ages 5 to 10. I consider a trip to the theater a success when there are no talking animals. I've seen most of the children's videos in our collection at least 72 times. I can tell you when the film gets reversed in The Wizard of Oz, the over-18 sexual joke in El Dorado and the tragic flaw with the ending of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. I could probably storyboard Nemo from memory alone.What makes me support the one child of mine (it varies) who suggests this title for the family movie of an evening? In a word: Showerman.Moment of silence...*sigh*

There are just so many things wrong with this movie.To begin with, the first twenty minutes of the film could have been compressed into just five or maybe ten. The overall movie is (mercifully) short already, but this could have been made up for by giving a little more attention to the Mean Lion (how did the miss a reference to "The Wiz" on that one?) and working his subplot a little more closely into the main plot. In short, the script had the seed of a good idea, but needed quite a bit of reworking.Second, it could have done without the crude humor. The original also had some that it could have done without, but at least there it was almost an afterthought -- here, flatulence and urination abound.Third, the show is a little too self-aware. The original series had that well enough, as did the first movie, but here it's just way, way too much. The Brendan Fraser in-jokes were just a bit over the top (and why no mention of the "new Ursula"?). Other gags with the Narrator, especially a couple of interactions near the end, also exceed good sense.Fourth, a bit more attention could have been given to the CGI work. In the first it was hard to tell that Shemp wasn't a real elephant (except by behavior, of course), but here the CGI stands out like a sore thumb. Ideally special effects should merely tell the story whether they're good or bad, and they at least do succeed on that count, so it's a relatively small problem, but it's still there.All that said, Christopher Showerman's performance as George is decent enough. It lacks Brendan Fraser's charm, but Christopher only really fails in that specific comparison -- he even managed to give George a bit of personal depth, which should have been a major foul in a Jay Ward-inspired movie but wasn't here. Julie Benz as the new Ursula surprised me as being even better than Leslie Mann in the original.Most other performances were pretty standard, not standing out in my mind as either good or bad.

Could have been funny, but our family was turned off by the bathroom humor of this supposedly "G" movie. It wasn't enough to have people kicked in the genitals or be urinated on. No, one of the scenes includes birds defecating on the animals and a treaty to fix it. One of the fight scenes includes throwing wet animal feces and using fiery flatulence as a flamethrower. This movie is not appropriate for children under age of 13.Disney seems to have departed from the old slapstick humor guidelines of getting hit with something wet/messy that is not gross. The same plot and fight could have been done with rotting fruit and not changed the overall theme of the movie