Open Season

The 2006 animated feature, Open Season, has a lot more interesting aspects to it than it arguably deserves. Being the debut animated feature for Sony Pictures Animation, the story of a pampered pet bear being thrown into the wild with a fast-talking deer during hunting season did not impress critics or audiences, yet it still managed to make a profit at the box office and spawned its own franchise, with sequels, a video game and even a 2D animated series being released in 2024. Considering how unimpressive the film looks from practically every angle, it’s shocking it has as much traction as it does, and it raises the question of how it was able to achieve this despite the much stronger competition from other, more experienced animation studios coming out around the same time?

In the small rural town of Timberline, a domesticated grizzly bear named Boog (voiced by Martin Lawrence) enjoys his safe, stress-free life with his caretaker, park ranger Beth (voiced by Debra Messing), but this changes once he meets a deer named Elliot (voiced by Ashton Kutcher) who Boog passingly saves from being tied to the truck of Shaw (voiced by Gary Sinise), the nastiest hunter in town. After saving his life, Elliot tries to hang out with Boog, but their wild interactions around town eventually leads to both of them being shipped back into the wild. Believing this to be a misunderstanding, Boog tries to return home but requires the help of Elliot to lead him back as he has no idea where to go, forcing the two to stick together as they traverse through the chaotic wilderness, deal with antagonistic animals who have no love for either of them, and escape before Open Season arrives and they become prime targets for hunters, especially Shaw who has been waiting to officially claim the two as his trophies.

For a first-time film from a new animation studio, Open Season does nothing to stand out, provide a unique voice or visual identity, or break the mold from other animal cartoon movies of its kind. While not unwatchable, the cliched plotline, stale characters, wonky animation and zero laughs from the script leaves this as a pretty poor introduction.

Despite looking like a bargain-bin knock off by today’s standards (and in all honesty, even back then), the people attached to this movie were anything but. Even outside of the cast, the people behind the camera have been attached to bigger and better animated projects in the past and it’s bizarre to see them injected into something so hollow. The directors for this film, Roger Allers and Jill Culton, worked on several animated projects (Allers co-directed The Lion King, and Culton was a story artist for Shrek and the first two Toy Story films), co-director Anthony Stacchi is an effects animator whose worked on films like the Back to the Future sequels, Hook, Ghost, and James and the Giant Peach, and the story creator, Steve Moore, is a cartoonist responsible for creating the syndicated sports cartoon, In The Bleachers, and would later go on to direct the similarly low-quality but equally franchise-heavy, Alpha and Omega series. Whether it was the excitement of producing something for a new studio clouding their judgement or they were just throwing stuff at the wall in the hopes of something working out, it’s hard to pin down exactly what went wrong but either way, this isn’t a movie that feels like it has experienced people working on it.

Despite being relatively inoffensive and at least housing an attitude that isn’t as painful as it could’ve been, Open Season is home to several lame cliches, expected tropes without any new added to freshen them up, a tone of comedy that’s pretty in-your-face irritating, characters that barely leave an impression, and writing that really feels like it’s the catalyst for why it sunk so quickly The writers for this movie alongside Culton and Stacchi, were Steve Bencich, Ron J. Friedman, and Nat Maldin, people who don’t have the best track record in their filmography (Maldin wrote films like The In-Laws and Dr. Dolittle, and Friedman and Bencich worked on Brother Bear and Chicken Little), which explains the general root problem, which is only worsened by additional story writers like John B. Carls, Sam Harper, Dan Wilson and David Gilbreth, who also don’t have any credible material to their names. It just feels like several people got together and blended a mishmash of several outdated animation tropes in order to contend with similar films at the time, and the results were as expected.

Making an animated film starring talking animals with celebrity voices was already a popular trend, it seemed to be at its highest peak around the period this movie was released, with most big animation companies following suit (DreamWorks just recently released Madagascar, Shark Tale and Over the Hedge, and Disney was failing bad with movies like Chicken Little, Brother Bear and Home on the Range). Considering it made a profit (earning $200 million against an $85 million budget) and spawned a very low-effort franchise, it clearly jumped on the bandwagon and road a smaller but still similar road of success, but unlike some of these past examples that at least knew how to use their celebrities for more than just marketing purposes, Open Season doesn’t use any of its cast effectively. You can tell why they got people like Martin Lawrence and Ashton Kutcher given when the film released, but much like other poorer examples of this celebrity-run animated era, these two are so outdated as actors nowadays that it just instantly dates this movie, not helped out by both also being pretty irritating. Neither is really bringing anything that any other actor couldn’t bring, and it really just feels like the animators and writers are working around them rather than having them bring anything to the script. They both have no chemistry, their characters are pretty unlikeable and annoying, their designs are a mixture of bland and even disturbing, and both Lawrence and Kutcher on occasion have a delivery that could be humorous, but nothing they say is ever funny or memorable.

While the leads aren’t very good, the film fumbles even worse with its supporting cast, with people like Billy Connolly, Jane Krakowski, Patrick Warburton, Jon Favreau, Gordon Tootoosis, Nikka Futterman and Georgia Engel just being in the background with pretty much nothing to do. They have distinct voices and once and a while, can have a humorous delivery, but the writing is just so bad that it’s almost impossible to find anything funny (when you make Patrick Warburton not funny, you know you’ve reached a new low). Debra Messing actually isn’t too bad as Boog’s owner for the small screen time she has, but since the film’s pace is somehow both too quick and too slow, it doesn’t really allow much time for them to build a meaningful bond (which is noticed pretty heavily by the end). Gary Sinise is also pretty wasted as the bad guy, with a motivation so confusing, a design so blandly unappealing and a voice and lines so generic that he doesn’t leave any impression either as a threat despite occasionally being a little intimidating (for younger viewers mostly, but still enough).

Sony would later go on to make animated movies with unique visuals styles which separated them from other animation companies, but you couldn’t feel that with some of their earlier productions (outside of a specific need to be as lame and dated as possible). Given the fact that Open Season came out during a time when CG animation was no longer a new technology, but not quite at the level where people were experimenting with it yet, it results in the film being in this obvious in-between where it doesn’t necessarily look terrible, but it’s hard to say that it’s really that good. It does have a sense of timing to it, the colors and lighting are passable, and there are some nice forest backgrounds that have a 2D look to them, but otherwise it’s pretty uninspired. The character models for the humans aren’t the worst but certainly don’t look realistic or distinct enough to stand out, the animals are given a hint of a cartoonish exaggeration, but not to the point of looking impressive, and the movements aren’t believable enough to feel real, nor spongy and flowing enough to be enjoyably outlandish.

This was also a movie that was clearly shot in 3D, with a lot of awkward close-ups that feel very random and forced, and outside of a few aerial shots near the end of the film, nothing screams that it would’ve been better with that perspective. The music was a collaboration between Ramin Djawadi (who would go on to compose the music for Game of Thrones) and Paul Westerberg (the former lead singer, guitarist and song writer for the punk band, The Replacements), and it definitely feels appropriate for the kind of environment the film takes place in with a very twangy, country-rock based sound that feels rural and outdoorsy and on occasion doesn’t sound too bad, but for people who don’t like that genre, it can be pretty obnoxious as it’s all over the place. There’s also a lot of songs created by Westerberg which are forcibly injected into moments where they don’t belong and actively tell you the way you should be feeling (which is another component of these kinds of animated movies of the era), and none of them really sound that good.

Open Season just feels like any other generic family kids’ movie of the 2000s, and it barley did anything to showcase a new animation company in a good light or even justify its existence in an era when animation was not as strong as it previously had been. Regardless of its poor quality that everybody was aware of, it still managed to carve something out for itself and continue living on in follow-ups (all of which were direct-to-video and were also met with mixed reception) and the only thing that seems to explain this is that it continued a trend that was popular at the time and many families (mainly children) were going to fall for its safe blandest. The story is predictable, the characters are generic, the writing is pathetic, the visuals are uninteresting, the music is annoying, and absolutely nothing about it is really worth checking out even though it’s not going to do any harm to anyone if they were to see it. There are worse films out there, but this is an animal dropping of a feature that needed a proper clean-up.