Movie Review — Barnyard

Remember those foam “stress relief” toys from the 1990s, the ones you could squish into a malformed ball and they would slowly restore to the original shape?  That is the apparent basis for the design of the cows in the animated film Barnyard.  It’s also the only redeeming feature of the film.

• The male cows all have udders.  According to IMDB, the director says this was an intentional joke.  That may be true, but that doesn’t make it funny.
   
• Other than the cows and a couple other barnyard animals, the bulk of the character designs are simply ugly.
   
• While this is positioned as a movie leading into a Nickelodeon television series, it’s obvious that the reverse is true: they took several episodes of the proposed TV series and strung them together  The entire film is structured in roughly 20-minute chunks, and several of the pieces have characters who do not appear in other chunks.  If you’ve going to give us a movie, give us an actual movie, not a re-edited batch of TV shows.